CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FROM The 7-Day Shelf PS 1922 se"*" """'®™">' '■"'"'^ Sometime. 3 1924 022 252 062 The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022252062 SOMETIME COPYRIGHT, 1933. BY ROBERT HERRICK PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TO M.H.C. "For is it not possible for d thinges to be well, ones all men were good. Whych I thin\e wil not be thies good many ^ ' SIR THOMAS MOORE, UtOpta, BOOK I. "Human purpose has arisen as a product of the mechanical wordings of variation and selection. But now that conscious- ness has awa\ened in life, it has at last become possible to hope for a speedier and less wasteftd method of evolution, a method based on foresight and elaborate planning instead of the old, slow method of blind struggle and blind selection. At present that is no more than a hope. But human \nowledge and power have grown very marvellously during the last few hun- dred years. The multitude of our race living today still does not know of more than a minute fraction of what is known to man, nor dream yet of the things he may presently do." WELLS AND HUXLEY, The Science of Life, vol. i, p. 642. "We are living now within a few thousand years of the sec- ond glaciation; the world's climate is still oscillating one hopes towards mildness, though perhaps we are only living in the fool's paradise of an intermission or an inter glacial — and mod- ern research reveals the traces of ages in which humidity has increased and waned and ages of comparative dryness and cold." WELLS AND HUXLEY, VOL. II, P. Oil. Contents I. IN NEW KHARTOUM 3 II. THE LETHAL TEMPLE 38 III. YOUTH 64 IV. HERE AND THERE IN THE NEW WORLD I06 V. MOUNTAIN COLLEGE I43 VI. THE VOYAGE 161 VIL "little OLD NEW YORk" 1 85 VIII. TUNNELS, TOWERS, AND VAULTS 212 IX. MORE OF NEW YORK 259 X. THE REAL AMERICA 287 XI. THE GREAT DECISION 334 SOMETIME Chapter One IN NEW KHARTOUM A ND that, my friends, was the end of the Old World,— /j\ destitution, disease, violence, confusion — chaos!" The A j^ speaker paused after each sharp word to let its im- phcations sink into the consciousness of his hearers, while a grave smile flickered over his thin lips. "An unimaginable state of affairs to us, so much needless human misery, such waste and desolation in the midst of plenty, — such an un- reasonable conclusion to the immense efforts of humanity in preceding ages! . . . For the dissolution of the old order was NOT caused by the advance of the Ice Cap over the more thickly populated parts of the earth as has so often been taken for granted. Historical and archaeological researches have definitely proved that the social cataclysm at the end of the so-called Christian era anticipated by at least a number of decades those cosmic changes which closed one period of our earth's history, erasing most of the vaunted creations of man- kind and transforming the appearance of the globe into what we know today, on land and sea." The old man wheeling alertly at this point swept an arm towards the two colored relief maps which had just been pro- jected upon the blank wall behind him. "To the left you see a fair representation of the earth's surface as it appeared to the human eye about the middle of the twentieth century of the Xian era, with its two unequal masses of land, its mountain ranges, rivers, lakes, seas — and 4 SOMETIME so forth. To the right is a map of our world brought up to date, with what information we have so far been able to glean about the forgotten western hemisphere, which still remains very largely terra incognita to us because as you know until comparatively recently the more northern parts have lain under a heavy coating of ice — ^just as what was once Europe is still buried beneath glaciers." "We'll soon find out what North America is like," a youth- ful voice interposed. The lecturer smiled at this sally and the ripple of laughter from the circle of his auditors that accom- panied it. "Don't anticipate, Paul," the old man admonished. "In due time nothing on our earth, I trust, will be unknown, unused. But today the future is not my subject. Rather the historic past, out of which we have moved to the present. . . . Com- pare our own continent — ^Africa — in the two pictures," he re- sumed. "Before the coming of the Ice Age that was its ap- proximate appearance as far as the limited knowledge of what men then called the Dark Continent went! . . . There was a vast desert across the northern part where the Sahara Sea is now. . . . Here was the site of Khartoum on the old maps, — a dot between the Blue and the White Nile, on the very edge of the desert, known to civilized men even at the end of the Christian era mainly because it had once been the scene of one of those barbarous conflicts between native African peo- ples and invading and proselytizing whites from the North. As many of you doubtless are aware, almost where we are sitting was the old Arab village of Omdurman, headquarters of the Mahdi, so-called false prophet, while a scant three miles eastward on the shore of our beautiful Blue Lake was the miserable mud village occupied by the Englishman Gordon and his followers, where he met his death from the spears of the natives. It is all so utterly different in appearance today IN NEW KHARTOUM 5 that neither Gordon nor Kitchener, who was sent to avenge his murder upon the Mahdi's followers, if they looked in upon us this afternoon, could possibly recognize their Khartoum. Part of those vast changes have been caused by the geologic convulsions following the recent Ice Age, which among other details linked our Sahara to the Atlantic and restored the former bridge between northern Africa and Italy. But even more considerable have been the changes due to the work of men, to the gradual transformation wrought by succeeding generations as they have planted and watered and built, and I hardly need to add, to the subtler, infinitely more important change worked in humanity itself, in our mentality, during these ten centuries since modern men first raised their heads and surveyed the wreckage of their world." The lecturer paused at the climax of his thought, and then as the illumined maps faded from the wall turned and with a new intensity in his tone continued, — "Yes! These changes within us have been immense, of far greater significance than anything that the last Ice Age has done to the earth! These profound changes of mentality, of human consciousness, verily of our beings, are the theme of these talks which you have asked me to deliver on the eve of the departure of our first exploratory expedition to the sites of the forgotten continent, where we expect to uncover in all its detail the civilization of one of the more advanced peoples of the old world. What we shall find there in the subterranean recesses of those ancient cities, in the masses of concrete and iron — ^for they were great builders — and the rusted remains of their famous machines, all now lying buried beneath mounds of earth and great forests, will be of interest to us chiefly as indicating the contrasts between the sort of mind that made them, that put its faith in them, and our own mentality. To 6 SOMETIME prepare you for what will there become apparent I am talking to you." He paused to select his point of attack, and presently went on, — "One of their favorite aphorisms in those last days before the collapse, when the end of their troubled world was plainly discernible, in the time of dissolution itself, was, 'Human nature being as it is,' which meant weak, vicious, uncertain. A doleful apology for every form of human incompetence, irresponsibility, folly! It was a thousand times worse than the habit of their more primitive ancestors, who put all their failures and tribulations to the account of some malignant God ! . . . 'Human nature being as it is, forever and ever,' " the old man's voice whined ironically. "As if they knew — ^had ever made the least attempt to divine what human nature might become! Well, we moderns have been demonstrating now for nearly a thousand years what that selfsame despised human nature is capable of accomplishing under direction, with the stimulus of fresh conceptions, with the infinite goal of perfection always on the horizon of men's minds. And we have hardly begun the story. It will take our human race many more thousands of years to explore the unknown possibihties of the human mind and the human spirit! For our motto has been 'Human nature as it may be- come' and 'Life as it might be,' with enormous variety, per- petual change, for thousands upon thousands of years yet to come on this planet — and who knows? even in other worlds beyond our present reach! Keep then this profound distinction in your minds, while we examine the nature of that old abor- tive civilization that went dov/n into such depths of degrada- tion and human misery before its wretched remains were almost completely obliterated beneath the glaciers of the recent Ice Age! For it is the master key to the culture of that IN NEW KHARTOUM 7 strange civilization, more removed from us in spirit than even in time and circumstance. . . . 'Human nature being as it is.' That false Htany wails through all the vi^ritten records of those final catastrophes which have come down to us! . . . "Remember it was not the approach of ice, nor any other cosmic incident that wrecked the old so-called Xian civiliza- tion, any more than the preceding civiUzations known to the men of that day. Mankind had arrived so nearly at the point (barring a few unessential problems of technique which doubt- less their clever scientists and engineers would have solved in a short while) where we are ourselves in control of human environment that if they had but wanted to— if they had had the firm united will — they could have abolished want, famine, practically controlled all disease, done most of what modern man has accomplished in the last ten centuries. Even fore- warned as they were of the glacial period they might have avoided much of the wholesale extinction caused by it by tak- ing measures in time to transfer the bulk of their populations and their enterprises to the equatorial zone from which man first emerged. . . . "Instead, just what did they do, at the apogee of their powers, when they had already successfully tapped the riches of their earth, and begun to explore scientifically its enormous possibilities ? They indulged in one horrible war after another, three great bloodlettings within the space of sixty years: first the Crusade of 1914-1918, called the 'War to End War,' next the war of the Orient, when the western white peoples stood supinely aside in the illusion that it would be well for them if the yellow races exterminated each other, and lastly the greatest and most destructive of all wars, between East and West — the 'War to End Civilization,' as it might be called. The yellow peoples armed with all the ingenious technical contrivances of white men's science, with all the weapons 8 SOMETIME forged by the so-called superior races, turned these instruments of destruction upon their inventors (already weakened by their own strifes) and practically annihilated them. Those who escaped the flood of poison gases and disease germs let loose from the sky by the 'yellow devils,' as the miserable white men called the invaders, fled from their desolate cities which had become pestiferous morgues and eked out a wretched existence in remote wilds, hiding in caves and scratching the ground for sustenance like their prehistoric ancestors, until the increasing cold of the northern hemisphere drove these refugees south- wards into the tropics. , . . From those demoralized refugees many of our best stocks owe their blond coloring and other racial characters. . . . "A tragic epos ! It all happened within a brief two hundred years of time as man reckons time. Those machines of which they were so inordinately proud — they themselves called their last degraded epoch 'the machine age' and never dreamed of anything better — did nothing to avert the tragedy they had enabled man to make so thoroughgoing. In fact there were a few among their own commentators who held that it was man's insane infatuation for machines and the sort of life created by the machine that mainly brought about his ulti- mate downfall. Man made the machine to be his servant, but quickly it became his master, and men by the millions became the slaves of machines. There are some who beHeve that if twentieth century mankind had been able to control the out- put of the machines, the end of the story might have been far different from what it was. But I think not. The disease was deeper; the machine was but one of its symptoms. Men could not control themselves nor the sort of society that they had organized: it got beyond them. They thought their par- ticular social order was divine, unchangeable, but it was man- made and like everything made by men ephemeral and def ec- IN NEW KHARTOUM 9 tive, doomed to destruction unless constantly controlled and modified, energized by fresh spirit. But the spirit of humanity had become stale, as well as cowardly and cruel: it had turned in upon itself and festered. . . . "That was the ultimate cause of their downfall. It was not the work of natural forces — of any God — ^but of man himself, of what he had let himself become, which destroyed him and most of his works. Remember that! In the midst of plenty, in this beautiful world with all its possibilities opening before them, men went out to kill each other and to destroy all they had created, all that had been their inheritance from past ages. The most colossal tragedy of recorded time! No wonder that our writers and our painters and musicians choose that act of suicide as their supreme theme, only equaled in interest by that other theme of the rebirth of the world after the retreat of the Ice Cap." . . . The old man having touched the height of his thought dis- missed his audience abruptly with a wave of his arm. "Enough for today!" He leaned down to pat the head of a large fawn-colored dog that had unobtrusively entered the room and taken a position in front of his master as if to remind him that the sun was faUing athwart the greensward outside and that it was time to come out of doors. The group of men and women of different ages who had been Hstening to the old man moved slowly from the room through the openings in the wall made by rolling up compactly the flexible glazed partitions of the room, exposing to view a small grassy court in which a foun- tain trickled into a large marble basin. Around the edge of this marble basin some of the audience lingered in talk while others drifted off into the great recreation park below. . . . The old man carrying over one arm his white silk robe 10 SOMETIME seated himself on the edge of the basin to rest and enjoy the refreshing coolness of the hour. Spare, erect, with close-cropped hair and beard he looked to be nearer fifty than ninety-three years, which was his age. Yet it was only on occasions like this requiring some special effort that he felt fatigue. All his life he had adapted his activities so nicely to his physical power that he had not yet been obliged to surrender any of his in- terests. "Wearing out" was a distressing anachronism in the new world. . . . The old man conversed with those who lingered near him in the mood of ironic gayety that was habitual with him. . • . "Yes, I hit them hard," he said in response to some observa- tion. "It has been the sentimental fashion latterly to condone the faults of those wrong-headed peoples, to make all kinds of excuses for their perverse blindness, their paralysis of will, their insane doctrine of self-interest. . . . But why.? Of course from their own point of view they were justified in all the mischiefs they did to themselves, but hardly from ours. . . . Their boasting was as bad as their rationalization, simply in- credible! The old records give me a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, just reading their own accounts of themselves, so full of empty self-praise, so complacent and back patting! Especially their so-called leaders, their big business men and politicians, their publicists and journalists. They were always pretending, always putting the blame for their own follies on somebody else's back. ... It does me good occasionally to free my mind about our forebears of the great Industrial Epoch. Besides I feel it is well that some of our young people who have notions that things with us don't go as brilliantly as they might should learn how it was in those old days of what they called 'liberty* and 'freedom.' " The old man let an arm fall affectionately on the handsome youth who had interrupted his lecture. IN NEW KHARTOUM ii "I suspect that Paul doesn't find their push and swagger and eternal talk of individualism and national egoisms and all that patriotic bunk so unreasonable, eh, Paul?" "We must grant them their point of view," the young man retorted primly. "But why should I grant them their point of view when I know what a mess they made of their world with it! Their 'point of view' as you are pleased to call their insanity led them and nearly a billion and a half of their fellows down a steep place into the abyss — which was plain enough for the more intelligent among them to perceive a good fifty years before the final catastrophe. ... It would not have been pohtc to tell them all I think of them and their selfish obsessions if they could hear my words. But now that they have become the dust of the dust, blown about the universe for a thousand years and more, why should I respect their feeUngs? I am sure they never would have respected mine, had I been alive then and dared to proclaim aloud what I thought of their terrible civilization within the hearing of their leading people. You know what they did to all who did not agree with them or at least keep their mouths shut? Torture and prison and death, at the very best social isolation and destitution awaited anybody reckless enough to express doubt as to the sacredness of common beliefs, such as the inviolability of personal prop- erty, the obligation of fighting whenever one's own country got the kilHng fever, and all the rest of their sacred cows. It was far better, on my word, when men were less civilized, when they burned and tortured under the influence of mis- taken religious notions: at least they did their dirty work in the name of their God about whom they had very little exact knowledge, not in the holy name of private property! No, I will not 'grant them their point of view,' however clearly I recognize what caused it." 12 SOMETIME The dark young man sat silent, scowling to himself. Next him a fair-haired girl, one of the few blond types in the audi- ence, ventured to defend him. "I think Paul means that the people of those times felt they were right in what they did, in urging everybody to get what he could for himself, and to fight his neighbors if they hap- pened to live outside the national compound." "They were conditioned — ^just as we are today!" Paul asserted. "And how are we conditioned today, young man?" old Felix demanded quickly. "By every idea that passes through our minds. These have all been instilled in us by tradition, by teaching and propa- ganda. You know what I mean. You are one of the most powerful agents of the collective idea, as you often assert. Our modern world is a subtle tyranny!" "Indeed — a tyranny of good ideas, let us say." "But some of us would like occasionally to do the running and change the dominant ideas!" "Such as.?" The young man became silent, perhaps abashed by his daring in thus bearding the most notable person in Khartoum, in Africa, possibly in the entire world. The girl at his side, red- dening under her tan as only a blonde could blush, interposed. "Paul means that some of us young people would like to decide for ourselves certain things, whether we should or should not have children, whether a larger increase in the birth rate should be permitted, more colonies established in new places. . . . We are Expansionists!" she concluded proudly, lifting her dark eyes to meet the old man's amused smile. "So, Alisa, you are an Expansionist.? You would like to have IN NEW KHARTOUM 13 more babies born into this world this year and more the next and so on — do you understand where that would lead ?" "But we needn't go as far as they did in those old times- have more children than could be properly looked after. . . . But we are a long way from that situation at present!" "What with this new continent to be opened up to settle- ment and the expected shrinking of the Ice Cap from northern Europe and Asia there will be all the land needed for new colonies, indefinitely," Paul put in. "So you think we are not going fast enough in repeopling the earth?" The young couple nodded and Alisa observed softly, — "That's why we are Expansionists." "I see!" The old man smiled noncommittally while his eyes examined the girl's white tunic which did not have the thin thread of gold around the neck, the insignia adopted by those young women who had obtained the permit necessary for childbearing. "I see," he repeated in a gentle murmur. The girl blushed more deeply under his glance with a mutinous, half-frightened expression in her dark eyes. The young man, as though to cover up his companion's embarrass- ment, returned to the argument, — "With all our new sources of food supply and the success of aerial transport the globe could easily support in modern conditions twice its present population, without even touching the new lands. In a few years if what everybody says about the richness of that forgotten continent proves true, why, there could be three or four times as many people Hving. And there are all the possibilities of new inventions, and the HkeUhood that some day we shall find our way out into the heavens and discover some other habitable planet to — " "What should we do with all those added billions of human lives?" the old man demanded, as if he had inserted a knife 14 SOMETIME blade into the mounting enthusiasm of the youth. . . . "Of course we could contrive to pack five times — perhaps by squeezing and crowding as they did in the old world, as many as ten times — the present number of lives. But just where would be the advantage?" "At least it would give more of us the chance to live our lives as we want to!" the young man exclaimed. "I doubt that! Have you studied the vital statistics of the old regime? Do you believe that the vast majority of persons in those older societies lived the kind of lives they wanted? Think of the constant lack of employment, and consequently of food, of the millions that even in their prosperous times existed on the edge of starvation, the uncertainty that most of them had to endure — " "But we have learned to manage better than they did, as I have heard you say often." "No doubt, thanks largely to the will not to allow too many lives to come into being. . . . But even if we could manage to give everyone a fairly decent existence — ^which the old world never succeeded in doing — ^what do you think would be the gain in having, say, five or ten billions of human beings on this globe (or scattered about in nearby planets!) where we now have less than half a billion, all properly cared for ?" The young man was baffled and relapsed into silence, while the girl remarked accusingly, — "We thought you would be with us! Why have you worked so hard for the Exploratory Expedition to the new continent ?" The old man, whose tone had been friendly, paternal and jocose, became suddenly grave. Looking steadfastly at the eager young faces gathered about him he pronounced slowly: "Because, I suppose, I am not an Expansionist as you call it! Certainly not in Paul's sense. I don't believe in the unregu- lated free breeding of human beings in the old loose way, the IN NEW KHARTOUM 15 animal way, with the consequent deterioration of the race, and all the inevitable misery and degradation for multitudes of individual lives in order that a few may flower out of their wretchedness, that such a haphazard method of reproduction would mean now, as it meant in the past. I do not believe in the multiplying of human lives on this earth like plants or insects just because we can manage somehow to give every- body enough to eat— if we could! That was the planless, fatalistic way of the old world, which our forefathers strug- gling upwards out of the chaos of the Ice Age were wise enough to reject. The increase of population cannot safely be left to chance, or Nature, as they used to call it!" "Then why explore the new continent.?" "For many sufiBcient reasons. Not the least because it will afford future generations a stupendous example of what it is best not to do, if they wish to survive and go forward. What we shall uncover in those centers of American industrial civil- ization will be sufficiently horrible or fantastic, I expect, to quiet such restless dreams of personal liberty that you and Alisa and other young people are fond of indulging in. (For that reason I shall invite both of you to accompany me when I make the journey to old New York, to see for yourselves what happened there!) . . . There was a fine specimen of the hit-or-miss way of living, the animal kind of evolution with its wastes, cruelty and futility as inevitable accompaniments. In place of that brutal disorder we of the modern world have carried on at an ever accelerated pace an ordered evolution. We l{now where we are going and how to get there whether you happen to like it or not!" The hound rose deliberately at this point and putting his forepaws on his master's shoulders looked fixedly at him as if to remind him that he was wasting time. i6 SOMETIME "Yes, Marco, we'll go for our bath now," the old man re- plied gently stroking the dog's silky head. "Too many words as usual!" Throwing over his shoulders the loose silk gown which he had been carrying the old man walked through the flower beds of the court to a low flight of steps that led to the Park below. Pausing momentarily before descending he gazed thoughtfully over the extended view, which at this time of day with the sun sinking into a golden haze over the broken lines of city roofs in the distance was entrancing. A cool breeze coming from the north across the lake ruffled the tops of the huge Uveoaks that irregularly dotted the Park. Pointing to one of the largest of the oaks he remarked casually, — "That marks the site of what was once the Mahdi's tomb. You know when the English under Kitchener defeated his Arab followers they rifled the prophet's tomb, cut the head from the body, which they threw into the Nile, and carried o£F the head to their museum in London. They pretended that this piece of savage violence was done to convince the prophet's deluded followers that he was a false prophet, mortal like themselves, and thus cure them of 'fanaticism.' But I take it that their act merely exemplified the brutal atavism of even the superior types of humanity in those days. The English re- peated it many times, at Amritsar in India for one. It was ineradicably of the nature of conquerors always. . . . All that distant part of the Park where the exercise fields are now was once a sandy island between the two rivers. After the English had reconquered this land from the Mahdi's followers they ruled it through the connivance of certain Arab chieftains whom they ennobled. One of them — Sir Aga Khan I think he was called — lived on that island, exacting tribute from his countrymen, taking his toll of their flocks and herds as the price of protecting them from their masters. He used to sit on IN NEW KHARTOUM 17 the terrace of his EngUsh house and watch his sheep and goats water at the river." Indulging in historical reminiscence the old man proceeded slowly along the shaded path that wound downwards towards the Blue Lake. . . . "That is the story of 'imperialism' as they called it every- where, although they glossed it over with many fine phrases. The EngHsh were not interested in the old Arabs, nor in their land except what they could get out of it for themselves. What they wanted in this arid desert of Africa as it then was before we changed its climate and topography was control of the River Nile to fertilize their cotton plantations between the two rivers and down below in ancient Egypt. . . . Water was more precious than diamonds and rubies in this country as it was then: they who controlled the Nile ruled this section of Africa and its peoples. You would not care to repeat that story, would you, Paul, if you had supreme power ? It was not merely the story of Africa: it was the same in all parts of the world under the rule of individualism and chance! Rape, conquest, slavery for the weak, the rule of the strong or 'the survival of the fittest' as they learned to call it, excusing their evil actions." "One does not have to repeat ancient tribal morals in a more enlightened age," observed the young man. "Ah, when the world gets crowded with too many indi- viduals each seeking his own life without regard for the whole that is inevitable I am afraid. There are always — at least there were in the old savage 'state of nature' — so many weak and defenseless, so few strong! It was always so even under the most enlightened governments, even between peoples of the same blood and tradition. Have you ever studied the records of the Machine Age, with the immense factories, furnaces, mines, and moving platforms ? There was a slavery worse than anything the followers of the Mahdi ever knew!" i8 SOMETIME As they were speaking they were overtaken by a battalion of the labor units coming into the city from work in the out- lying sections, at the airports and the industrial laboratories. Young men and women between the ages of twenty and thirty- five were loping along the broad path in a kind of march rhythm, singing and beating their hands in time to the song set by their leaders, as though they had come from some form of sport. The old man's face relaxed over this apt illustration of his thesis. "I'll wager one never saw that sort of thing under the old regime!" he chuckled. The young man who had but recently completed his labor service admitted the claim frankly, — "No, one doesn't read in the old records of much that was enjoyable about necessary labor. Mostly drudge for pay, or bribed by special privileges." "Their religion had a fable about work being a curse imposed upon humanity because of the sin of their first pro- genitors — ^which showed what they thought of labor, some- thing hateful and degrading that everybody tried to escape from if they could." "Except the big fellows on top!" "Yes," the old man agreed, "the head men got what rewards there were." The labor battaUon passed on towards the Lake, while old Felix rested under the shade of the Mahdi's oak and spoke aloud his musing thoughts, — "In those early days this delightful Park around the mud village of Omdurman was merely a gleaming desert of sand over which there grew occasionally after light rains a sparse herbage on which their hungry flocks nibbled. Although the EngUsh watered their cotton fields nearby with water filched from the river nobody thought of transforming the desert as IN NEW KHARTOUM 19 a whole and making an agreeable and fertile country of the Sudan, as it is today. Nature helped, of course, by turning the great northern desert into an inland lake at the time when.it again joined Europe with Africa. But the intelligence of man and his labor has largely performed the miracle that you see. The painstaking and purposeful toil of generations went to the making of fertility, salubrity, beauty, where there had been little but ugliness and human chaos. For modern men are not content to be the victims of their environment: they will what that environment shall be. In that rests all the distinction be- tween the old world with its notions of fate, imperialism, individualism, laissez-faire, and the rest of their superstitions and our own orderly evolving civilization!" The old man's long vision seemed to transform the lovely expanse of parkland before their eyes into what it once had been, — ^what, were it not for the incessant intelligence and watchful care and unremitting toil of succeeding generations, would quickly revert to its former stark and savage state of desert, as had been the fate of so much once habitable land upon the globe. If that is what Expansion should come to mean, the old man seemed to be thinking, if free breeding and the occupa- tion of new lands should lead the race back to the savage competition of group with group, individual with individual, to devastating wars, slaughters, famines, pestilence — as always in the past — better that the Ice Cap should remain forever over those northern lands, that instead of retreating it should ex- tend its tentacles downwards to the Equator itself and exter- minate under its immense glaciers the last remnants of human life, proved incapable of self-direction, self-salvation! . . . The new order had taken ten centuries to recreate itself, building bit by bit on the ruins of the old wherever found, reforming human destiny. Yet all this might within the space of one brief 20 SOMETIME lifetime be destroyed as civilization was destroyed at the end of the Xian era before the coming of the Ice Age. And how many more thousands of years might it not require to regain what modern man had now attained — ^if ever! . . . Nodding to his young followers as if at the triumphant demonstration of a favorite theorem the old man quickened his pace, his dog running about him in great circles over those sand hills where old Sir Aga Khan once had pastured his flocks while he dealt with the lordly Englishmen who held his people in bondage. As he drew nearer to the Lake which now gleamed through a fringe of flowering acacia trees, there came from across the water the sounds of stringed instruments making a music so diffused in the light air that it was impossible to tell just where the orchestra was placed. Softer, then louder, now as if the strains fell from the sky above, then afar off, the agreeable sounds penetrated the evening atmosphere, as much a part of it as the scent of acacia blossoms. Groups of people were already engaged on their evening meal under the trees by the lakeside, while others strolling in from every quarter dropped their garments on the sandy beach and plunged into the still water whose surface had become saffron color. There were naked bodies of every shade of color from amber brown and glossy black to white, indicating a variegated racial inheritance. No one appeared in the least conscious of body or color or class, all being absorbed in the enjoyment of the moment. The old man loosened his tunic and stepped into the water with his dog, no notice being taken of him. Boys and girls, young men and women, frolicked about, churning up the amber-colored water, or darted off in impromptu races towards one of the low wooded islands that dotted the Lake. Others left the water, dried themselves leisurely in the last rays of IN NEW KHARTOUM 21 the sun filtering through the trees, and after donning their simple garments strolled over to the food booths to select the dishes they preferred for the evening meal. The food was served by a special detachment of the labor bands, boys and girls, whose assignment was in this depart- ment. The custom of communal feeding was so prevalent that it no more occurred to anyone to desire a private kitchen and food supply, than it would have occurred to an ancient Chris- tian to want his own gasoHne pump. The very old and the sick were cared for in special establishments: all others ate wherever their tasks might take them. The supply of food in abundance and great variety was universal and free as air or hght. The inhabitants of Khartoum preferred to take their evening meal, which was the most substantial of the day, be- side the Lake after their bath. . . . Old Felix who was expecting a friend to arrive shortly on the evening airliner from the East watched different groups of bathers as they entered and left the water. They came from many different human stocks, African, European, Asiatic. Thanks to the facilities of swift easy communication between different regions of the globe, modern people had the habit of moving about freely, settling temporarily wherever their in- terests led them at the moment, and mating freely with each other. The mingling of different peoples during the century of migration before the oncoming ice had done much to break down racial prejudices and begin the merging of stocks that had persisted ever since. Thus the old world superstitions about race had completely disappeared from human consciousness. Indeed, the ideal of the pure race had been hardly more than an aristocratic prejudice during the dechning epoch of late Christianity, although clung to stubbornly by some as a mark 22 SOMETIME of superiority. Its unreality had long been known to biologists and those who were scientifically minded. Fortunately the new world was unhampered by this delusion of the pure race, and in fact progressive centers such as modern Khartoum prided themselves on their intricately mingled stocks. Old FeUx himself among the many genes in his blood had two quite different inheritances: his mother's line from western Africa beyond the Sahara Sea and his father's from one of the smaller Greek islands. Neither of these, however, was pure in the old sense — how many minor crossings there had been in his ancestry it would be impossible to tell (as in reality had been the case with members of the most exclusive clans in the old world). Descent in the old family sense no longer counted for social prestige, while inheritance in the biologic meaning had become of enormous importance, i.e,, a proved freedom from any taint of disease or inadequacy. Alisa had failed thus far to win her right to maternity be- cause she could not establish an unblemished record of four generations. Her paternal grandfather, of Teutonic extraction, had developed symptoms of insanity in middle life (because of which he had, quite voluntarily, chosen to enter the lethal chamber) and her mother had been segregated because of im- morality, having borne a child while still formally mated to a youth who had not won his permit. So while Paul had passed all the rigorous tests required for parenthood Alisa whom he loved would have to be sterilized before living with him, and thus become an unequal partner. Unions between unequals, in this sense only, were often happy, but there was for both man and woman always the danger that the mate denied parenthood might later prefer another union with the expectation of children. That risk was, however, no greater than what many had taken successfully and would always be taken by those ardently in love with each IN NEW KHARTOUM 23 other, desire for the one mate being stronger than the diffused desire for unrealized offspring. . . . There was no less affection for children in the modern world than in older societies, rather a stronger, more universal love because of their greater rarity and the highly prized distinction of having them. Yet all children now seemed to belong to the community as a whole as well as to their special parents. As had been the case with so many private possessions of the old order the child had been merged into the common interest (as with some primitive peoples) receiving care and attention from the entire group. With the decline of the private owner- ship fetish that had once covered every aspect of life from marriage to shirt studs, tyrannously, the powerful instinct of possessive parenthood — a most useful bond in the old forms of society — ^had gradually relaxed. Many children especially after the first months of infancy were brought up by others than their own parents, for one reason or another. And the child- hungry woman had little difl&culty in gratifying her passion for maternity without endangering the strict hygienic control of society by conceiving and giving birth to dubious or inferior offspring of her own body. . . . Felix refreshed by his bath sat on one of the park benches contemplating the animated scene along the lake front. It was the common hour of relaxation from every form of effort, and no one seemed too tired or too sophisticated to enjoy its simple pleasures. . . . The old scholar whose mind was richly stored with pictures of other, less favored forms of civilization, con- trasted the naturalness of the nude bathers, the free intermin- gling of all ages and kinds of people here on the beach with the oppressive 'self-consciousness of older times. Many inhibi- tions had been eradicated from human beings, largely because of the simplicity of the way of living; individuals were free, 24 SOMETIME light-hearted and gay, Uke healthy children, and like normal children found a spontaneous and joyous interest in everything they did. There was no cause for worry, in fact. Food and shel- ter was abundant and free to all, like light and air. Occupation was universal, unhurried, uncompelled, and nicely fitted to the needs and the tastes of the individual. In fact life itself, as the old man musingly saw it from the vantage of his crowded years, was one long tapestry on which was unrolled in conti- nuity a charming story. One woke to a succession of peaceful busy summer days. "They don't think so much about themselves — ^that is the strongest note of distinction between that dreary old world and our happy modern one! We are not shut up within ourselves as in so many separate prisons, to which we have been con- demned for life to solitary confinement. . . . Only the greatest and the simplest human beings could escape that prisoned existence under the conditions in which they lived their lives, of fear, envy, competition. One must be 'born again' with them to enter into a natural freedom, while these days everybody is born at once into a total absence of self-consciousness, into harmony with himself. A happy people!" . . . Suddenly there appeared on the eastern horizon a glow, like a large luminous torch balancing the descending sun which was about to disappear over the western rim of the world. Momentarily it became more brilliant like an approaching meteor drawing downwards in a magnificent fiery arc towards the earth. It was the China mail, a huge aidiner that circled the globe westwards in time with the rotation of the earth. It was both the most rapid and the most dependable form of transportation thus far perfected and for long distance jour- neys had largely taken the place of the earlier, clumsier, and slower electric-driven airships. The old man like the thousands along the Lake front gazed IN NEW KHARTOUM 25 admiringly at the approaching ship. Majestically it crossed the Lake far above their heads showering Ught upon the bobbing bodies of the bathers Uke another sun and settled to earth in a big basin of the airport beyond the Lake. Soon the sky above the airport became alive with small balloon-shaped flying boats, the airtaxis that transported the passengers on the great airliner into the city. One of these settled like a butterfly near the old man and out of it stepped a tall woman who waved a knotted scarf in greeting to Felix. "Here I am!" she announced. "On time to the very second, to use the old formula." "So meaningless when one is time itself in these new liners! One doesn't have to carry a watch or even look at the sun," she continued gayly. "It is as much of a convenience as the new cellulose clothes one can pack in a handkerchief and pick up anywhere so that you don't have to carry bags about with you. That held everything I needed on this week's trip!" She held up a thin reticule such as women once used to carry their handkerchiefs and vanity cases in. "Do you remember the pictures of arriving and departing travelers in the days of steamships? Such mountains of lug- gage! The ancients were so wedded to personal possessions that they had to carry trunkfuls of useless things around with them just to show they had them. Before that time they even had their favorite belongings buried with them! . . . Well, what sort of voyage ?" "Oh, perfect. We left old Shanghai this morning, had tea at Bombay, and here I am — all there was to that! . . . That is a nice odor!" She filled her nostrils with the scent of new-mown hay which was coming strongly from across the water on the light evening breeze. "He is a real artist, our atmosphere man! One misses his 26 SOMETIME skillful touch out there in Asia or perhaps the sense of smell is as undeveloped or as perversely developed as their sense of sound: they still create those squeaky symphonies vi^ith the knife-edge split notes that make your backbone shiver." "Perhaps that's what they like doing most, to make one's flesh creep. They always were an odd people from an occi- dental point of view, although they have been catching up these last few hundred years. We must give them time." "They'll need it! . . . Where shall we sup?" "On die island?" The woman nodded, and they stepped quickly into a small shallow water boat that ran as if self-directed, its dial having been set, towards the point of a low wooded island. The sun having dropped below the horizon had left behind a broad orange stripe across the western sky, into which the great airliner having taken on westbound passengers was rising slowly, majestically, prepared to speed on after its magnet, the sun. "Such a beautiful sight!" the woman remarked, her face smiling like a child's over a strange toy. "I can never get over the wonder of them, rising so softly like a bird as if one had merely to express the will to mount into the heavens. And their luminous bodies are like great glowing torches in the sky! . . . We are something, we moderns," she murmured ex- ultantly as her face gradually relapsed into calm. "When one thinks how mankind used to go about their errands in stuffy trains or shut into nasty rocking steamships!" . . . "Well?" the old man demanded after a time, "what have you to tell me, Veronica ?" "So much, Felix! But I must have a plunge first, I feel so sticky after a whole day in an airboat. They keep it pleasantly cool but one can't bathe, just sponge off in ether spirits." IN NEW KHARTOUM 27 As she talked she unconcernedly stripped off her clothes, which merely involved untying a few knots here and there, letting the sUght garments fall about her feet. While Felix slowed the boat she stood on the covered prow prepared to dive. Against the yellow sunset light her firm white flesh gleamed with a tint of old ivory, very becoming with her curly chestnut hair. Her limbs were long and rounded,— the body of a mature middle-aged woman about fifty years of age, still fit and pleasing, neither bulging with fat nor sallow with arti- ficial leanness. (The naked body of an average middle-aged woman of the late Christian era would have been considered a disgrace in modern Khartoum!) With the nonchalant gesture of a sportive child just out of school Veronica took a light leap into the water, holding her legs close together so that they seemed to flash as they dis- appeared beneath the surface of the Lake. Coming up some distance from the craft she floated lazily contemplative, wind- ing her hair away from her face. After a few moments she swam back to the boat and skillfully lifting herself astride the bow sat there wiping the drops of water from her smooth skin with her hands as a kitten might wash its face. Felix gazed at her admiringly. She was so natural and uncon- scious in her loveliness, so powerful and alive! Her face was in repose, peaceful, contented, her tawny eyes reaching up- wards in the direction of the disappearing airliner which now had risen to such a height that its luminous surface had caught the sun's rays. Veronica's smiling face expressed her joy in it, in life. "It's nice to feel good soft water once more," she remarked dabbling her toes in the Lake. "They don't seem to know how to make pleasant swimming places in China — they haven't any instinct for Water . . . and one wonders whether they are careful about disinfecting it regularly." 28 SOMETIME The old man reached over to the control and started the little boat, then Hghtly touched the woman's head. "You are so lovely, Veronica! ... It always comes over me with fresh surprise and delight every time I see you Uke this." The woman thus brought back suddenly to self-considera- tion smiled mischievously, retorting, — "You should have seen me twenty years ago, Felix. Then I was worth remembering!" "No doubt you were marvelous in your blooming period. But being long past that age myself I prefer you just as you are today, with your firm flesh and ampler form, — ^the abun- dance and assurance of maturity. . . . The old world litera- ture, their novels and plays, made too much of unripe fruit. They must have been written for boys and girls, mainly. Reading them you would think that only youth possessed the power of emotion. While you and I know that the most inter- esting and vital emotions come with maturity, ripeness!" "That is true!" "We are like that airship and the sun, you and I: we keep in due relation to each other!" "Which one is the sun ?" she retorted in the same bantering tone, while she took from her bag a little roll of thin material, which being shaken out developed into a filmy silk garment of violet hue. Drawing it over her head she asked, — "How do you hke the color ? They still make the best silk in China, and these new paper weight garments are such a comfort!" Gather- ing up her discarded costume she touched a match to it; it disappeared instantaneously. "I think if one took a poll of women as to the greatest im- provement in modern life over the old times they would all declare it was the abolition of laundry! Think of messing about with dirty linen, even with a machine! Think of wearing any- thing next one's skin twice!" . . . IN NEW KHARTOUM 29 The little boat skimmed in close to a wharf and the two established themselves in a chalet built out over the water and presently were supping on a new kind of melon recently introduced and an ice, while from thickets on the island be- hind them came the songs of birds mingling with the lap of little waves beneath. The birds answered one another as if trained to sing in chorus which was in fact partly true. For instead of exterminating song birds modern society made a great effort to encourage them by feeding and protecting them and also training the young at certain periods and accustoming them to sing together. The Bird Choir Master was one of the lesser functionaries of every considerable center. . . . "It is so nice to be back!" Veronica exclaimed, pushing aside her slice of melon. "It is all very well to carry heaven within you as you are always saying, and it is interesting to see new people, new places, and to discover how other peoples are working out their lives under different conditions. I am a good anarchist at heart, but I like my own corner of anarchy best and always shall." "That merely proves that you fit well into your corner. . . . But, Veronica, at heart you will never become a perfect anarchist: somewhere within you there is too much primitive woman! You might easily revert to the fireside and children and everybody-in-the-place-God-called-him-to of some remote English ancestor." Veronica made a face. "You too like our old Khartoum pretty well!" she retorted. "Of course! Haven't I lived and worked here fifty years of my life? It is, after all, the best corner of the modern world, — ^most even climate, the most alert people, the — " "Yes," Veronica mocked, "the most enlightened and venture- some and progressive center of the New World, the inhabitants most unlike the peoples of Northern Europe and America at 30 SOMETIME the end of the Christian era, — all that thanks in good part to the exertions of our Greek Felix. ... I agree with you. . . . But all the same even we are far from perfect . . . our anarchist ideal may have a jolt one of these days." "It has had them every day since the Ice Age, but somehow it survives them all. It works, as they used to say, better and better all the time. . . . What success did you have?" "I brought back a good bunch — darlings some of them, lovely little Japanese and Ceylonese. You must come over to the college and see them. I am sure they will be all the rage. Such gentle dainty little women — ^the boys will be crazy about them. . . . But that is not all I saw. One learns more than one's business going about in strange places as I did. Felix, you stay here in Khartoum too much, you don't know what is stirring in the world outside." "Don't I ? They flock here by the thousands from every cor- ner of the globe. Half the people I meet every day come from some other place than Khartoum. And there are all the foreign members of the control and consultation boards dropping in for our monthly meetings, to air their new ideas!" "But meeting people that way, selected ones, who come for some special purpose isn't the same thing as living with them in their own homes and watching the ordinary things that happen. Of course they all know you, admire you and your work, and they let you believe that everything is lovely, smooth-running — and that everybody thinks as you do!" "Well ? don't they ?" the old man queried smiling at his com- panion's vehemence. "Not always! . . . For one thing India is reverting, — too many babies, subsistence level deteriorating. I suspect their new control board is lax. There seem to me to be too large a per- centage of birth permits, and many of the women are too young, below the minimum age of eighteen years for child- IN NEW KHARTOUM 31 bearing we set a hundred years ago. . . . And China has not yet rid itself of the strong man idea, the celestial ruler and all that nonsense. Their new enclaves in North China and east of Turkestan are like primitive tribal bands, a one-man boss affair. The next thing we know they will be enslaving the Women and fighting among themselves up there. The old bosses rule with a hard hand and the young people sneak away into new wild lands and nobody knows what they do off in the mountains by themselves. I suspect there isn't much steril- ization or restriction of population or birth permits in those remote corners." The old man's face became graver. "We shall have to consider what we can do to help those outlying districts. It is difficult to get the right ideas of control adopted at once in sparsely inhabited countries. We can have some of the leaders over for a talk and send some of our best young people over there to start colonies." "That isn't enough! Even when they have been brought up here or in other advanced centers, once back among their own kind they so easily revert!" "Oh, they'll swing into step in time," the old man said serenely and after a few minutes added, — "At any rate we can do nothing more even if we wanted to force them to our way of thinking in a hurry. Our modern world has been developed on the theory of no physical control, no force. Instead, we use only psychological methods. We know that the old order broke down under too much control, too much government. At the end it was all government, all rules and regulations and pro- hibitions that nobody minded! They called our method anarchy and would have hanged you or me as 'disturbers of order' had we dared to open our mouths in public. . . . Yet for all their laws and their discipline I dare say the modern world has never known as much disorder in its entire history 32 SOMETIME as any one of their big centers put up with every year, — ^what with kilHngs, legal and illegal, kidnappings, thefts, and all the rest of their thousands of crimes and felonies. Confess, Veronica, that we are much better off even with a few sporadic cases of atavism on the outskirts of civilization!" "Of course, I don't want to see any Mussolinis or iron-fisted old-fashioned governments introduced into the modern world, with their broken laws and their corrupt brutal poHce forces and armies and hired thugs — of course not, never ! But are you sure that revolt is confined to remote and less civilized parts of the world?" "You mean the Expansion movement?" Veronica nodded, while the old man related the incident at the afternoon's lecture. "Alisa is afraid that she may lose her man," Veronica re- marked and added thoughtfully, — ^"She is a fine girl, will make a splendid woman. I think in such cases some latitude might be permitted." "You mean that she should be allowed to go off to some place with her Paul and have whatever children came! My dear anarchist, isn't that just what they are doing out in North Asia which you think so reprehensible? . . . Isn't Alisa free to hve with her Paul or any other young man she fancies as soon as she has been sterilized?" "Of course — but you must make some allowance for woman's strongest instinct!" "Which is?" "If she loves a man deeply she wants that man's child above anything in the world. There is no escaping that fact!" "Then she must take care to love only men fit to give her children and also herself be of the elect!" "Ah, but we can't all be of the elect!" "No," the old man admitted, realizing how deeply his com- IN NEW KHARTOUM 33 panion's protest went into her own experience. "That is fate. And fate cannot be entirely removed from man's life. . . . One must bow to fate when it is unkind — as you have done, my dear, and triumph over its limitations — as you have done, dear Veronica!" They kept early hours in Khartoum (as they had in the old Arab town), as nearly sun time as was convenient, not liking to live by artificial light. So when Fehx and his com- panion reached the landing stage there was nobody about; the streets of the city were silent as they threaded their way through the squares and porticoes and colonnades of the end- lessly varied buildings. The sound of water was repeated from one fountain or cascade to the next and the scent of gardens from the inner courts of the houses mingled with the odor distributed from the central atmosphere station, which at this hour had been so reduced as to be scarcely perceptible. Both knowing their way well turned instinctively where necessary, but the outer walls of the buildings being softly luminous lighted the open places with a subdued glow. As there was little wheel traffic within the city pavement was often replaced by turfed walks soft to the feet. . . . Gradually as they passed out of the center of the city the dweUings were spaced by large gardens arranged around inner courts. At one of these on the bank of the Blue Nile they entered and de- scended through outer courts to the river front where Felix's private apartments were built upon a terrace. These consisted of several large bare rooms, one of which was in the form of a loggia jutting out above the river itself, where he slept. From this loggia there was a wide view over the roofs of low buildings and across gardens and courts to a thick forest on the further side of the river. For a man of Felix's occupations and interests there might seem a singular absence of books and of writing facilities, also 34 SOMETIME of ornaments and personal possessions. But his life was spent so largely outside his living apartment (as was the case with the ancient Athenians) that he had little need for the clut- tered quarters of an old world habitation. Any book or pamphlet that he might wish to examine could be easily illuminated on one of the bare walls or be spoken in a natural voice from the central library some miles away. This modern library was merely a convenient stack room for innumerable reels and records with the attendants needed to care for them and operate them. One of the old man's secretaries brought to his eye or ear whatever he might wish to acquaint himself with. Thus the human eye, so badly overworked in ancient civilization (so that almost everybody must disfigure his face with glasses), was very largely relieved of the burden of gathering information and had regained a natural delicacy and acuteness of vision that only savage peoples had formerly possessed, while the mind having been trained to gather infor- mation through sound as well as sight had become remarkably attentive and retentive. . . . The attendant in the outer court nodded to the old man when he entered, murmuring, — "Nothing important tonight," which meant that from all parts of the civilized world nothing of any special interest had been gathered from the air since he had left his rooms early that morning, or had been already relayed to wherever he might have been at the moment. Veronica saying that she was tired withdrew to her own apartment nearby, and Felix lay down on the couch in the loggia. Drawing over him a light rug he settled himself for rest. Although it was midnight and the city was stilled in sleep the old man lay awake. He rarely slept for more than three hours towards morning, feeling that so little time was left to him in life that he could not afford to waste it in vacant sleep. He lay watching the stars thickly set in the sky, IN NEW KHARTOUM 35 some in the eastern horizon seeming to hang among the branches of the forest so large and luminous they were. One of the much discussed projects of the day was a voyage of discovery among these distant worlds which undoubtedly would in time be accomplished when certain atmospheric diflSculties had been overcome; there was little reason to be- lieve they could not be surmounted. But for the present generation the siu-ging spirit of adven- ture must be assuaged by the Great Expedition to the forgotten continent with the promotion of which the old man had been closely identified. The primary object of the expedition was the exploration of the sites of American cities, and all the extensive remains of American culture which it was hoped might be found beneath the forests that now covered so much of the continent. This great archaeological imdertaking might very likely be the last considerable effort of the old man's busy life, fitly crowning the long series of researches into past forms of civilization which had been his life work. Now all the infinite details in preparation for such an expedition had been accomplished: the advance engineering imits were already on the ground preparing to bore first into the labyrinth of old New York; all that remained was for him to start with his personal staff for the site of these excavations, within a few weeks. Yet just now doubts had begun to blur his purpose. This new spirit which he had already divined fermenting among his youthful fellow-workers and which Veronica in- formed him had in other forms reached to remote corners of the world disturbed him more than he had admitted to Veronica. The exploration of the long lost continent was to these restless spirits less a scientific expedition for the enlargement of knowledge about a past epoch of human evolution than an ordinary exploratory effort or survey of desirable territories 36 SOMETIME to be exploited for the expansion of the human race. Occupa- tion of this continent for so many years asleep beneath ice and forest might be necessary, beneficial, in time, but he suspected that the Expansionists had the wrong approach to the prob- lem, not so far removed from the predatory spirit of ancient conquest which had animated the first European discoverers of what was then the New World. They had gone thither to dig up gold and pick up pearls and diamonds and had re- mained to kill off the natives in one of the most brutal exter- minations known in man's history — ^and then to fight among themselves for possession of treasures to be wrung from the earth by the work of slaves. If anything even faintly resembling that spirit of lust and rapine, of animal individualism, were to influence the present undertaking, the outcome would be dis- aster for the modern world. . . . The guiding principle of the old man's long active life had been the search for a larger future for the human race, — true Expansion, based on careful studies of the misshapen, haz- ardous past. Thus the records of ancient civilizations so laboriously collected and studied under his direction existed primarily in his thought in order that mankind might draw from them useful information for guidance. In the public lectures which from time to time he had delivered on the methods and purposes of the Great Expedition he had always stressed this point. The results of the expe- dition which would be carried by airwaves in picture and sound to every part of the globe and preserved for all time in many centers should establish the most favorable lines for human evolution. Everything in the past of humanity had been accidental, haphazard, a reckless dissipation of human energies. That past had been dependent upon unknown forces, giving rise to superstitions, — the idea of Fate! The present order was being conceived by the ablest minds with the fullest IN NEW KHARTOUM 37 knowledge, with definite purposes, using nature but not used by it. The future must reveal new avenues of expansion, new principles of enhancement of the values of life in endless variety. . . . Across the old man's meditations floated the memory of Alisa's mutinous face, of Veronica's unsatisfied look when she defended woman's right to conceive whether or not it was for the best interest of society. Could women ever be taught wholly to subordinate instinct to the common good ? Would it forever haunt the best women — and men too — ^this desire for self-perpetuation, filling them with the dream of another felicity, another adventure? . . . Must this uncurbed instinct to reproduce one's kind once more endanger the happiness of mankind? In the stern conditions out of which modern life had emerged the instinct of reproduction had been repressed by necessity. It was only in the last few centuries that the growing mastery of their environment and the accompanying ease of life in general had again revived the old problem of population and until now in no acute manner. Small new colonies had been set up in orderly fashion as opportunities were found, fostered and guided by the parent communities. Nothing since the Ice Age had been undertaken of the mag- nitude of this new venture in the lost continent. Would he live to regret his lifelong effort ? Sleep came at last to cut the coil of his meditations. Chapter Two THE LETHAL TEMPLE A FTER a few hours of light slumber Felix stirred at the Zj\ first touch of dawn. For a little while he lay on his A W. couch watching the delicate coloration of the eastern' sky, listening to the lively twittering of the birds already astir in the gardens below. Then as the first songs of the labor gangs rose from a dis- tance the old man went out on the terrace to watch the march- ing bands on their way to the day's tasks. Listening to their songs, a smile relaxing his firm lips, he recalled the sensations he had had as a boy at this hour in his distant island home, remembering some of his companions in his own labor band as one might old schoolmates, which in fact they were and more. Some were already dead, others had scattered to different parts of the world and rarely returned to their homes ; some had accomplished distinguished services for their communities, some had lived modest lives in obscure posts: in the modern world none could merely vegetate like parasites, accomplish- ing nothing. Every human being had some function to per- form, as long as he lived; the first effort was as a member of the local labor band, which was also school and apprenticeship. ' On the fundamental axiom that every being born into the world must, within his or her physical powers and abiUties, labor at some useful task carefully fitted to the strength and age and aptitude of the individual, the entire population was svstematically organized into units of the labor army according 38 THE LETHAL TEMPLE 39 to age. Nobody could escape the labor obligation any more than in older European societies young men could escape con- scription, except upon a certificate of his neighborhood clinic that the boy or girl was physically incapable of performing this duty — in which case the alternative of segregation and medical supervision was so distasteful that none would volun- tarily choose it! As a fact the labor obligation was considered as natural as anything in life; the younger members regarded it as a prolonged camping expedition. Felix remembered with keen delight that part of his life, the rising at dawn and bathing in the sea with members of his unit, breakfast in the open and the march to the assigned job, the jokes and the pranks that accompanied the work, the rest and recreation periods and the march home at night. Much had been done in recent years to develop the social and educational aspects of the labor assignments, while its functional side, its relationship to industry and agriculture, was all the time being drawn closer with increasing subtlety so that there might be no waste of human effort. Obviously more and more of the heavier and coarser tasks were being performed by machines, especially since the control of magnetic force had been perfected. Labor was now for the most part the skillful use of mechanical instruments and hence educa- tional. But there would remain always a certain modicum of purely physical labor which must be performed by the human hand. Such tasks were evenly distributed and carefully graded to age and aptitude so that the terrible exhaustion and brutal- ization of the laborer in less civilized epochs was avoided. Labor was considered, inevitably, less from the tyrannical point of view of production (never of profit!) and more from the point of view of training and discipline. The labor assign- ments, which extended from twelve to forty years of the individual's life (unless there was reason for exemption), were 40 SOMETIME in their larger aspects the educational and preparatory years where individual aptitudes and interests and tastes were dis- covered and developed. At the conclusion of the labor period, during the last years of which the tasks had been increasingly specialized, the individual man or woman had been fitted for his life work whatever that might be and henceforth (except in case of emergency) was freed from all obHgatory service in the labor bands. Sport was not neglected during these work years, but sport being combined with definite tasks and with recreation and rest periods never became a thing apart like athletics and games piu-sued for their own ends, a career for a few specialists amusing idle onlookers. . . . The years between eighteen and thirty were spent in the more strenuous assignments, often in distant, undeveloped lands where under suitable leaders the ardent forces of youth were exerted in difficult and dangerous tasks, such as the reclamation of desert and jungle, on en- gineering and building projects, to prepare sites for new colonies of settlers, etc. It often happened that after the years passed on such distant projects young men and women, if they had been successful in winning their permits to have children, elected to make their permanent homes in one of the new colonies and there start family life. Theoretically there was no more differentiation between the sexes in the labor obligation than in other aspects of social life. Girls were no longer condemned to the needle, the kitchen, the nursery (or to landscape gardening and interior decoration or other purely luxury work) unless they preferred such occu- pations and were really qualified to undertake them. Neither sex was considered lit or unfit merely because of sex for any form of work. Such distinction in fact had never prevailed in the lower, slave ranks of older civilizations, woman's exemption from the coarser forms of labor being an acquired means of THE LETHAL TEMPLE 41 social distinction rather than a biologic necessity. Some women obviously had as robust physiques as any men and also the taste for physical labor, while some males had the dehcate bodies and nervous organizations that fitted them for sedentary tasks. Yet the strong ambition of most women to bear chil- dren — ^not merely to enjoy sexual and emotional life which was open to anyone who could attract a mate, but to exercise their reproductive faculty, than which there was no higher and more exclusive honor in modern society — ^inevitably af- fected more or less their choice of occupations from their six- teenth year onwards. The majority of "helpers," i.e., laboratory assistants, clerks, nurses, cooks and such, were young women, while the majority of foremen, engineers, agricultural laborers, etc., were men rather than women, although there were many exceptions in both classes. But this differentiation of occupation was due less to the accident of sex (which was no longer pure accident, the sex of an infant being pretty nearly always predetermined by its parents) than to the inherited instinct of the individual. For complete functional interchangeability of the sexes more time must elapse, the functional distinction of the female hav- ing been so relentlessly ground into the human race for untold ages. All arbitrary distinctions of sex in clothes, manners, habits, moral notions, had long since disappeared from human society, and their recurrence would be as much derided by the modern youth of both sexes as "Victorian" manners were once. (One of the popular subjects for comic sketches was the picture of an American or EngUsh woman of the old style in relation with a modern young man or vice versa and the consequent misunderstandings!) Because one human being happened to be born with male reproductive organs and another with those of the female was no more recognized as cause for differentia- 42 SOMETIME tion in daily life and conduct than if one happened to have a dark skin and the other white. In the warm climates where the earliest modern settlements flourished, such as Khartoum, the habit of naked public bathing had done much to cure that exaggerated and prurient sex curiosity that had so disgustingly characterized the social life of the later — so-called Christian — centuries of the old order. It was believed that the over- emphasis of the sexual aspect of life to the point of neuras- thenia, one of the more decadent elements of every ancient civilization, had been due less to religious and economic influences than to the desire to increase sex lure. Also the preposterous cult of virginity no longer had any repute in the modern world: virginity in either sex after the eighteenth year was solely a question of personal choice, like preferences in food or occupation. Nobody of either sex pretended to a virginity no longer existing, because virginity in itself interested no one. . . . Felix's meditations on these and kindred subjects were in- terrupted by Marco's anxiety to get his master off for the morning bath. The dog always slept by the old man's couch, as had his father and his grandfather in their time. Ever since he was a mere puppy uncertain in his rolling gait he had accompanied his master everywhere and was almost as widely known in Khartoum as Felix himself. . . . Everybody had some sort of animal companion, bird or beast, ranging from parroquets to monkeys and young ante- lopes or lynxes. Now that wild animals were no longer hunted they had become quite tame and familiar, coming into the city for food and drink. Felix preferred dogs because the dog from his long association with man had acquired sympathy and an understanding of human nature that made him espe- cially companionable. Moreover, he considered that dogs had certain admirable traits of character which it would be well THE LETHAL TEMPLE 43 for men to emulate, such as fidelity, devotion without expec- tation of rewards, readiness to subordinate themselves to their superiors. If one made an intimate friend of a good dog and observed his nature closely he could learn many useful lessons. The old man had got into the habit of talking aloud to Marco as to a trustworthy familiar. The hound would cock his head on one side and Usten attentively to these discourses, respect- fully refraining from interrupting or interjecting impatient comment as would almost any mere person. . . . "I know, Marco, we are very late this morning. I got to thinking about those boys and girls in the labor gang that went by just now and that somehow led back to this per- plexing problem of the birth rate, which I am afraid has popped up to plague my last days! It reminded me of those bad old times when human beings bred hke animals — worse than any self-respecting dog because your females keep you somewhat in order and the human female encourages the male in his Hcense. . . . "The old unscientific idea was that something called natural selection and survival of the fittest weeded out the unfit, and it worked well enough while humanity was still savage, primi- tive. The strong and the tough survived and because they could survive they were the best for the sort of world they had to live in. But when men got intelligent enough to thwart those simple natural laws, to preserve the unfit and the less fit along with the fit there was a pretty mess. But they wouldn't do anything about it even when the superior members of society recognized clearly enough what was the matter — ^when the load of unfit had become a staggering burden for the rest to carry! They were afraid of old superstitions, which told them it was wrong to interfere with God's laws (even when they no longer believed that God made the laws!). They invented a lot of nonsense about a divine purpose working itself out 44 SOMETIME through the misery of millions of wretched human beings. . . . Even the best minds seemed uncertain what could be done to improve their own breed although they knew well enough how to make fat cattle and swift horses. So they just closed their eyes in blind faith in fate or nature or whatnot, which had this matter in charge, and somehow out of misery and squalor the human race would miraculously improve and they kept saying all the time that it was improving although they knew well enough that it wasn't, just becoming slyer and greedier. "Well, Marco, our immediate ancestors got rid of all that nonsense. They had a hard time Uving through the frozen period. Not many babies were born — ^nor dogs — during those first years after the ice! There was not enough fertile land to supply food for many millions. And somehow humanity had undergone a change, perhaps a biologic change: they had fewer offspring even when the food began to be plentiful and there was no longer that reason for self-restraint. ... It has only been for the last couple of centuries that we have had to take care there should not be more beings born than we could properly provide for. . . . "The world moves fast these days, about twice as fast as be- fore the Ice Age I calculate, and if we let 'em 'expand' as they call it we'll soon be back where the so-called Christian peoples were, in a mess, with a lot of low-grade helpless creatures dragging down the level of life to their own neces- sities. We can't have that, Marco! Never. Not if all the good- looking young women have to go without babies for a couple of generations! We'll ration 'em — or steriHze 'em! There's nothing automatic about it, as the old fellows believed — and nothing mysterious, just a sum in arithmetic. . . . "Well, let's get out into the morning, Marco! There's a lot to be done today, boy. Veronica wants me to visit her college THE LETHAL TEMPLE 45 and see the eastern beauties she has collected, and there's my lecture and the meeting of the Control . . . and that nice blue- eyed woman who wants her Permit— I must look into her case. ... So come on!" When FeHx reached for his gown the hound put his front paws on his master's shoulders and gave him a little lick,— his way of acknowledging the old man's confidence, then bounded downstairs into the inner court where he gave a few short sharp barks to let the household know that its master had risen. In the little inner court below the air was filled with a fresh morning odor, the richest and pleasantest perfume of the day, a mingling of dew and flower scents so that one could not tell whether it came from the yellow roses blooming in profusion along the wall or from the city laboratory. Varieties of flowers had been developed that bloomed every season of the year, and the laboratory perfume was designed to reenforce the natural odor of the season. But today there was a strong tang just beneath the heliotrope, the jasmin, and the rose perfume from the garden. "A dash of heather," Felix commented sniffing critically, "combined with something salt, what comes from salt marshes along the sea at high tide. An excellent combination!" It recalled to him the sea home of his youth. "A real artist, that fellow — I must remember to congratulate him on his mixtures." (If such an appreciation, in terms of the connoisseur, of the humble sense of smell should appear effeminate, it must be remembered that in the modern world the faculty of smell so long acutely outraged in the ancient world had been highly cultivated: the skillful blender of fragrances considered himself no less an artist than his brother musician, who at certain hours of the day filled the air with agreeable sounds.) 46 SOMETIME Outside Felix's compound the streets were quite empty. The labor bands had already passed out of the city and most of the older inhabitants had gone to their various occupations. The irregular meandering ways that served for communica- tion were interspersed with flower beds and broken by unex- pected parks. The plan of the city would have been the de- spair of any landscape architect or old-fashioned "city planner," for instead of a checkerboard of intersecting streets or broad arteries for crowded motor traffic there was a bewildering maze of irregular design, each section being treated by itself, thus to give as much as possible the unpremeditated effect of country living. A square here, a small park there, a broad strip of greensward would be broken by color plantings changed at times. The landscape department was ever busy varying the general effects of the plantings, and as all arts were considered one, the bright plots of colored plants harmonized with the frescoed walls, the vine-covered roof lines, the rivulets of flowing water. To walk through a modern city like Khar- toum afforded a combination of agreeable surprises. . . . As the sun's rays fell in bands of gold across his path Felix turned a corner and faced a small green park completely sur- rounded by tall cypresses. He paused at the entrance and glanced up the graveled path to a low white building over which an old jasmin vine grew in loose profusion, its delicate blossom-covered tendrils waving gently in the morning air. This was the Lethal Temple for this quarter of the city, an essential and quite characteristic institution of the modern world. Here came those who for any reason wished to end their lives before the natural term, as well as those infrequent cases where society had determined to rid itself of some mis- taken evil life. Instead of heaping every contumely and denunciation upon those who through sickness or emotional distress or inner con- THE LETHAL TEMPLE 47 viction happened to become weary of living their Uves, modern society provided them with a suitable opportunity for a decent and painless fulfillment of their desires. No especial effort was made to dissuade them from their intention, a decent reticence being the rule in this as in all purely personal affairs. Never- theless, an elderly physician and a matron were always in at- tendance at the Temple to examine the candidates for suicide, and during the required three days of waiting discussed the question with them. If the sufferer seemed distraught or moved by an ephemeral emotion such as disappointment in love, the attendant physician had the right to require a longer delay or to refuse the use of the lethal chamber altogether. Suicide was considered a privilege that only those in their right minds should enjoy. If the person seemed normal and assured of his intention, no further restraint was attempted and after the doctor's examination the chamber was prepared, with the form of gas that was deemed most effective for the case. The candidate withdrew into a pleasant cheerful chamber, which was sealed for the necessary time, and his nearest friends — ^if they had not accompanied him as was often the case — ^were summoned to remove the body to the city crematorium. . . . Felix stopped before the portico of the Temple to admire the luxuriant jasmin vine which he himself had planted there many years before. The sun was just touching its dew-covered blossoms accentuating the gentle peace of the place, which the old man frequently visited. There had been a time long ago when he himself had entered the Temple with the firm in- tention of ending his life. It was after the death of the being most tenderly loved in all his long life. He was then very nearly forty, and they had been close companions for years. One of those maladies that still occasionally baffled modern medicine had attacked this loved woman in the full bloom of her beauty and power; the previous day Felix had accompanied 48 SOMETIME her to the lethal chamber so that her intolerable suffering might be ended. He had left her alone in the death chamber. The memory of her last glance as he rose from her side to leave the room would haunt him always, it seemed. He felt that it would be impossible for him to live without her loveli- ness, her staunch spirit of comradeship, her near and dear presence, and so the day after her death he had come back to the Temple, not in search of her whom he had lost — ^for all the arguments and the speculations of all the ages had never convinced him of personal immortality — but to end an in- tolerable loneliness. But the physician then in residence at the Temple, an old friend, after leaving him alone with his brooding thoughts for a time had undertaken to dissuade him from his purpose, stressing considerations that because of his emotional condition had become obscured — ^his unfinished labors — he was already reckoned among the most influential members of the com- munity, the last wishes of his beloved companion confided to the physician, and then touched his imagination — always his most active faculty — about the possibilities of further living. As a result Felix had agreed to defer the final decision for a time, staying on at the Temple where he seemed nearer the memory of the dead woman, until the first sharp sense of utter bereavement might at least become dulled. He recalled the trivial accident that had finally turned his purpose. Sitting desolate one morning in the garden of the temple inclosure, which at that time seemed to him neglected, needlessly forlorn, he asked himself, why should the last habita- tion be so uninviting, so repellant? Impulsively as was his habit to match perception with deed he determined to rectify that neglect so that the next comer might not be annoyed as he had been. Hurrying back to his home he summoned a gardener, and collected flowers and other materials with which THE LETHAL TEMPLE 49 to adorn the last resting place of those about to withdraw from life. On entering the outer court of his home his dog— the great- grandfather of Marco! — ^ran to greet him whimpering with delight at recovering his lost master. He must take the little beast in his arms to appease his emotion, which distracted the man somewhat from the acute sense of loss that here in their common home might have reawakened his desire to die. The quivering animal nestled in his arms and moaned with satis- faction at having found his master once more. The small beast's sense of abandonment and his vivid joy in recovering his human friend moved the sorrowing man strangely. "To some- thing I am still of supreme value," he thought ironically and took the little dog back with him to the Temple so that he might spend these last hours with his master and perhaps ac- company him into the lethal chamber. On his return, however, Felix became so preoccupied with the task of embellishing the place that for several days he thought little of entering the death chamber. Then one night came one of those rare sand storms called from ancient times a "hubbub," then common enough in this region at certain seasons of the year, but of late largely controlled by the ex- tensive forestation that had reclaimed many parts of the sur- rounding desert. The eastern desert across the Blue Nile had not yet been planted and occasionally from this old waste of white sand came the whirling winds that carried the sand cloud over a mile from the earth. The sand having mounted far into the heavens like a huge waterspout came sifting back to earth so thickly that one could see but a few feet in any direction. The dwellers in Khartoum perforce remained within doors for the duration of the "hubbub," stifled in their rooms into which in spite of all precautions the sand penetrated, very much as 50 SOMETIME centuries before the Arabs had sat huddled in mud huts or tents until the evil thing had exhausted its fury. The sand storm covered the city w^ith a gray coat to the depth of several inches, burying and largely destroying all the efforts Felix had just put forth to beautify the temple grounds. As he busied himself after the storm in uncovering the garden and observed the labor division at the vs^ork of salvage outside the temple grounds he thought how supine it was of men to suffer these periodic irruptions of nature, which fortunately they had now sufficient knowledge to prevent. Why should modern men permit their lives to be the sport of such wild forces as their remote ancestors had perforce suffered passively in all parts of the world? Flood, fire, and drought, hurricanes and sand storms, these were natural an- tagonists of man that must be subdued. Then and there came to him the magnificent design of covering the eastern desert lands with thick forests. This idea sent the man forth from the Lethal Temple the next morning, never to return thither for the accomplishment of his original purpose, although he often sought its peaceful seclusion for contemplation and rest. One thing had led to another in a busy, energized life, while the acute sorrow that had nearly driven him to his death softened to a gentle inner melancholy. Other women had entered his life from time to time, each with her own gift of beauty and affection, none to oust completely the image of the supremely beloved, held always in his imagination. He learned — a great secret of loving — ^not to compare nor to regret. Thus he had achieved enough happiness, even at rare times pure joy, in the intervals of his active life. . . . Now while he sat in the same foredourt under the jasmin vine which he had planted, watching the bees at their per- petual task of extracting honey from the blossoms, he recalled THE LETHAL TEMPLE 51 all this and much else and musingly thought how much he would have lost had it not been for the wise words of the old physician, also for the ardent affection of one small dog (long since dead of old age) whose little stabbing tongue had aroused his pity. . . . But now, he reflected, the time was drawing near when he might wisely carry out what in his too hasty youth he had wanted to do. Soon feebleness and the disabilities of age would have him in their inexorable clutch. He would become a care, a burden for others, which was intolerable. Moreover he might lose what was more important than physical strength, supple- ness of mind and quick sympathy. While he was arguing with the youth yesterday he had felt something rigid and hard forming within him, something dead. Convictions were no longer nourished with understanding of others, which the aged are apt to consider wisdom! One of the purposes of estab- lishing these lethal chambers was to permit the old to relin- quish hfe in decency with all their faculties alert, so that they might not be doomed to unlovely decay and dissolution, still living, as in the old days. Just here there entered at the temple gate an old man, one of his acquaintances for many years. Bent with withered face (albeit not toothless, which was no longer necessary thanks to modern skill in diet and hygiene) the old man dragged him- self slowly up the flower-bordered path towards the temple entrance, gazing wistfully around him, as if he were apprais- ing his last abode. "Looking for a place to rest awhile, Claude ?" Felix called to him. "Aye! For always." The two old men exchanged a glance of common under- standing. "And you also?" 52 SOMETIME "Some of these days I suppose," Felix admitted, then quickly, "but not just yet! ... I still have a few things to do before I could leave contentedly. I want to make the expe- dition to the western continent and poke about in what re- mains of that famous American civilization. You know of the plan to uncover some of their old cities, don't you?" The old man nodded wearily. "Yes, yes, everyone is talking about the wonders to be dis- covered when they get New York and Detroit and all these other cities dug up. But I see no use in it. Why not let them rot in their hives of steel and concrete the same as they lived ? From all one reads about them you will find little enough we should care to have." Felix laughed gayly. "Well, that's one good reason for excavating their cities — to realize how much better off we are as we have made ourselves. Though, they thought pretty well of themselves ! Those Ameri- cans were the most conceited, boasting people that ever ex- isted on this planet, forever swelling and bragging about their accomplishments, — ^until the year 1929 a.d. One doesn't find much complacency in their books after that date." "So you are going to all that trouble just to find out what not to do? I see no good in that," and old Claude shook his head in melancholy. "Each age to its own troubles and its own triumphs — and its own illusions. We have our own all right!" "What do you consider our chief trouble ?" Felix demanded briskly. "Oh, this idea that life can be anything much in itself, no matter what improvements we niay make in it." "My dear Claude, you must have a bad doctor! What makes you get that way so early of a fine morning ?" "Thinking of the many things that have happened to me in my eighty years of life, of many things that I have seen THE LETHAL TEMPLE 53 happen to others. ... It has not all been cakes and ale, as they used to say, by any means." Felix recaUing certain incidents in the other man's life re- plied in a gentler tone. "It is impossible to eliminate all risk and grief from Hving. As long as one accepts human life there must be those!" The old man gazed glumly at the silent Temple. "Well, one does not have to accept life as you say if one no longer desires its risks and griefs!" "That is true." . . . "Tell me," Claude began again after a short pause. "Do they plan to open up that great waste continent to occupation ?" "Perhaps — ^ultimately. ... It will take time, although our engineers think they have discovered a way to turn warm equatorial currents up close to the eastern shore, which should hasten matters, and establish a better climate than that part of the continent enjoyed before the ice settled over it." "Why so much hurry about heating it up?" "To make more habitable land for new colonies, of course. Population is rising all over the globe as you know, and although we have enough unoccupied land for the present in Asia and Africa, Europe promises to be slow in coming into use. . . . The New World, as it once was called, will be a splendid reserve for the future, once it has been brought back into condition." Felix was surprised to hear his own confident manner of treating the question, which was not unlike Paul's point of view. Something in the dreary old man had aroused a latent sympathy with Expansion. "Oh, aye, aye," old Claude scoffed. "Everyone is babbling about the wonderful things that will be done with this New World once we get our hands on it. After that has been brought back into civilization I suppose you will be turning 54 SOMETIME your minds to the stars and seeing what you can do up there to make 'em tidy places for humanity to exploit?" "Perhaps!" "What for ? Why fill up the universe with so many human beings?" grumbled the old man. "Haven't I heard you your- self, Felix, tell how this earth of ours before the last Ice Age was overcrowded with inferior lives, always growing poorer the faster they bred, so that not even wars and disease and want could keep the population at a reasonable point ?" "True! But think how different the quality was then, as the result of indiscriminate breeding. ... It is quality that coimts, not numbers, but I do not beUeve there is much likelihood of humanity degenerating, going back to the old loose way of indiscriminate breeding. ... So long as we can improve the quality of human lives there is no danger. Think what has been accomplished in a short thousand years ! How evenly dis- tributed and well nourished and comfortably settled humanity is today, without fratricidal strifes, without constant fear, the sense of insecurity, the few living off the labor of the many, without degradation, defeat, and disease for any considerable numbers. . . . We have gone a long way towards their old heaven!" "Yes, yes, I know all that," old Claude interrupted peevishly. "How can anybody escape knowing your improvement statis- tics! They are dinned into our ears at every corner, even the birds of the forests are taught to sing them. . . . But what of it ? At your very best life is no such great thing. Why add more billions to the population just because you can squeeze 'em in somewhere and feed 'em all and give them plenty of recrea- tion and baths and free music? ... I must say all that line of argument smacks too much of the crude ancient idea of the virtue of fecundity, the same sort of delusion of grandeur the German tribes were possessed with every now and then THE LETHAL TEMPLE 55 to the discomfiture of their neighbors. The Japs too — the same way. I have often heard you ridicule their claim to rule just because they produced more babies than any other people. . . . If we go on stufilng the earth and the neighboring planets with all the human lives they will hold, we will bring back inevitably stupid wars, greed, fighting for one's sacred ego and all the rest of the old rot which we pride ourselves on being rid of for good and all. . . . No, I see nothing but danger for mankind in your great enterprise. . . . Stay at home and cul- tivate your garden — or die as I mean to!" Felix's fine face became somber. "There is risk," he admitted, "there is always the risk of reverting. Our modern mentality which we rightly consider so superior to anything but rare isolated cases in the old world might degenerate as quickly as it developed, given the wrong conditions. If future generations tmll to revert to the old order there is nothing to prevent them even if we stayed right here in Khartoum and never ventured forth! That as you know happened often enough in the few thousand years before the last Ice Age. There were promising starts, like the Egyptian, the Greek, yes, the Russian at the end, but after a few centuries they relapsed. Nobody can say positively that modern humanity if given the wrong impulse will not do the same. . . . One has to take one's stand, either faith in the future with risk or — as you arc thinking of doing, give up con- sciousness as a bad job. I, my friend, prefer the other horn of the dilemma!" Having reached the inevitable crossroads the two old men were silent for a long time. Gradually a smile came over Felix's sensitive lips, and he began once more, — "What we are discussing reminds me of an extraordinary statement I ran across in an old English book I have been reading. The writer related with pride an anecdote of one of 56 SOMETIME the great American financiers, I think his name was Rocks- child — no, that was not just it; however, no matter ... a university president, one of the social leaches of the day, was trying to extract from this Croesus one of those large donations which at that period the excessively rich were in the habit of bestowing on educational institutions, partly for reclame — ^it was one of the easiest ways of getting oneself favorably known — and partly as a sort of social insurance, so that the ambitious youth of the day might be trained in conservative notions about private property. . . . This university president, it seems, was a very young man, arrogant and self-confident; he made the usual pleas on behalf of his institution, its growing size, num- bers of students and all that. When he paused, Croesus — ^Mor- ganbild or Rockmel, I can never remember their names — ^was silent, considering as the young university president fondly hoped the exact number of millions that he would hand over to him. When he opened his lips after a while, so the story runs, he remarked gravely hke an old sage, — 'Young man, if you can answer satisfactorily a single question I shall put to you, I will give you a larger sum of money than anybody has yet given to any college in the history of the world.' You can imagine how excited the young university president was! He simpered prettily as he replied, — 'Although I cannot pretend to be as wise as you, I should like to try my hand at being the Sphynx.' The old capitalist let his question slide over his thin lips, — 'What, young man, can take the place of Necessity in the world.?' The story goes on to relate how the youthful Diogenes was dumbfounded by such profound wisdom and sorrowfully took his departure from the great man's library, considering himself fortunate to be carrying with him a check for a paltry few hundred thousands of dollars instead of the expected millions." THE LETHAL TEMPLE 57 Felix laughed at his own tale, but Claude puckered his face and remarked, — "Well? What has taken the place of necessity in our world?" His companion became instantly grave once more. "Delight in activity; desire; joy,— a thousand difEerent motives! . . . The rich man's question seems to me to have embodied the entire forlorn mistake of the old world! The fundamental postulate of Master to Slave — ^is just necessity. Such a conception was born of slave mentality, or as no doubt the old capitalist sincerely believed in the fact that human nature being so, that is nine-tenths slave, would operate only under compulsion. Which no doubt was true in the world such as he and his kind had made and throve in ! . . . Yet the old fellow was reputed to be extremely philanthropic, and I have no doubt that from his narrow assumptions he was gen- erous, quite willing to help the poor and needy, although if I am not mistaken he was one of those great owners of an industry which ground its workers often to the very edge of existence, which extracted their labor through pressure of want skillfully applied combined with satisfying cheap desires, then administered a form of social paregoric in the shape of medical institutions and amusement centers, like the bread and circuses of the old Romans, who were also believers in Necessity and Slave Mentahty for the masses. ... He was a great patron of religion too, a very important person in those last decades of the Christian era, this Jacob Rockstein— I never could remember their names, so meaningless they were." "What was the matter with him ? I read his life once, and he seems to have been a very well-meaning fellow. In those simple times the strong individual had to manage affairs: they did not have such wonderful Planning Boards and Supreme Councils and Managing Directors of the Universe who do the job for nothing as we have." 58 SOMETIME Felix ignoring the jibe continued, — "Those benevolent capitalists as they used to call them must have got a considerable kick out of imitating God. They felt, no doubt sincerely, that the world could not go on without them — ^there were plenty of parasites in every class to tell them so! In time they ran it into chaos. You remember what happened between the Great War as they called it and the Ice Age? Their belief that they were necessary to the har- monious functioning of this world was badly damaged in those years. ... I wonder how this Ratkild and Morkahn and Yellon and all the rest of the tribe felt when their toy no longer ran! . . . No, my friend, that Sphynx riddle of the rich man was merely the flower of the master-slave mentality, which it has been our one great triumph to have largely eradicated from the consciousness of humanity. It has taken a good thousand years, but we have almost succeeded, — even if there are a few doleful skeptics like yourself. Man no longer recognizes Neces- sity as the one supreme law of his existence. Just in that as much as in anything he differentiates himself and all his con- duct from the miserable inhabitants of the earth before the last Ice Age . . . neither necessity due to Nature nor necessity due to his own nature. Mankind is at last broadly speaking a free agent, for the first time in the thirty or forty thou- sand years of his conscious existence on this earth." "And how about this little rest house?" old Claude asked ironically, indicating the dark interior of the old Lethal Temple. "Does this not seem to indicate the survival of one great Necessity ?" "You mean that men are still born of women and must die some time when their course is run? I grant you that much of necessity in our universe although we have saved uncoimted millions of wretched creatures from being born at all to be a burden to themselves and others! Birth itself is no longer THE LETHAL TEMPLE 59 compulsory, but a rare privilege! . . . And from the hour when the human child is taken from its mother's body and first sees the light, it is cared for, nourished and protected and equipped for its life as never hitherto was attempted. And increasingly it is left free to choose its individual destiny, guided merely by the choices made for it by its forebears and by the social control to which life must submit in order to endure. It need never know fear or starvation. Many hundreds of years ago we gave up compulsory labor as needless and degrading, substituting an organization of all youth into graded labor units. ... If mankind is not wholly freed from necessity, men and women are as free as they can be and exist!" Claude's expression evinced an increasing distaste for the doctrine, but he said nothing. "For Necessity as the mainspring of human activity we have substituted an instinctive desire for life. Living has become so desirable, so interesting, so provocative to the higher curiosi- ties, so stimulating to the creative spirit in men that as you know few among us ever seek the forlorn refuge of this Temple. Our modern world beats ever with a more powerful rhythm of passionate absorption in life, which flows from a veritable ecstasy of spirit. I see it every waking hour of my life, among the work units or in the laboratory, where are being formed the plans for our great Exploratory Expedition to the old New World. I myself feel this ecstatic flood of eager interest running through my old veins so fast that it threatens to suffocate me. At my ninety-odd years I find myself saying over and over,— 'If I may only Uve to carry out this last dis- covery, to set the Unes for a new and fairer use of this forgotten continent than what was made of it three thousand years ago!'" 6o SOMETIME Felix paused in his chant to catch his breath and rising strode lightly up and down the forecourt. "Very brave, very eloquent at least," his companion mur- mured maliciously. "I vs^ish I might feel as enthusiastic as you do about it all. But to me life is essentially evil, always was and always will be, although I admit that just now and here for some unknown reason there happens to be a temporary lull in its brutalities. ... I belong"— he hesitated and then flung out defiantly— "to the Old Believers who know that this world of ours, the universe itself, has been engendered in the imagination of some evil prepotent Force, working his willful design, which we shall never comprehend in its entirety. . . . Human life that you so vaunt can be nothing more than an uneasy dream, as deep-thinking men have recognized always." The two old men looked at each other defiantly. "So," said Felix gently, sighing, "you are one of them! I knew that a few like you existed here and there holding such dreary doctrines as you have voiced. But I thought they were confined to the remoter corners of the earth where old re- ligious superstitions hang on like smoke in deep caverns. Superstitions always linger on into the new life ! The Christian religion itself with its preposterous demands upon credulity was potent for centuries after humanity had rejected its major tenets: men and women were still found paying it lip service, for social reasons or fear lest it might be true. ... So your philosophy of despair, reasonable enough perhaps in a world where violence and wrong were universal, where existence was a bad gamble and generally miserable, still persists in a world that gives the lie to it every waking moment. How can you, my old friend, believe that this beautiful morning world we are allowed to enjoy is evil wrought of evil destined to an evil end?" "Not everybody, Felix, is endowed with your happy illusion- THE LETHAL TEMPLE 6i creating disposition, even in New Khartoum," the old man observed dryly and added meaningly, "nor everyone has been so fortunate as you in love and ambition!" Felix wheeled sharply and gazed scornfully at his com- panion. "You believe that? . . . So the worm of envy and of jealousy still eats at the human heart!" "Why not? After all you do not think that you have com- pletely changed the nature of human beings?" "Yes, by all the gods in every heaven that has ever been dreamed of, that is just what we have done, changed what is known as human nature; that is we have suppressed certain characteristics that were once considered basic, like greed and violence, and in their place planted not new impulses but enhanced old ones, so that the modern being of all ages and conditions reacts differently to any given situation from the way his ancestors would have reacted, arboreal or so-called Christian!" "You talk as if we had become gods," sneered the old man. "No, not yet — but we are on the way to become gods in time if you mean beings of a calm, harmonious nature with- out evil predispositions, whose intelligence has risen to a far higher level than that of any previous human race. Yes, we shall be gods in due time, and even today we are far more godlike than our ancestors ever dreamed of becoming!" "Unless we revert ... as always in the past men reverted to the primitive instincts deep down within." "Why should we revert until another Ice Age advances — perhaps not even then, because we shall have so far gained control of nature that we may know what to do to save the race, even then. . . . However, that may well not occur for another million years or so and much can happen on this 62 SOMETIME earth before that far-off day. ... I must be going to perform some of the things I have been chattering to you about." "Go on then, happy optimist! You haven't persuaded me that Ufe is vs^orth the Uving." "No? There are not many vv^ho feel as you do, not many nowadays w^ho come here to end a bad job. Scarce a score, the doctor tells me, in the past five years of his service here, and of these fourteen w^ere sent by their physicians for relief from incurable diseases and two of the others were misbegotten children. There must be a good many of your fellows who find life today not merely tolerable, but predominantly good instead of evil. . . . Look out there!" As if to point his argument some passing children had stopped to glance within, grew silent for a moment, then began to play among the flower beds. . . . Felix gathering up his loose robe called out, — "Wait for me, boys — ^I'U go along with you to the Lake!" Then tossed over his shoulder to the doleful old man crouch- ing on the marble bench before the door of the Temple, — "Better put an end to it, this evil life!" He made a gesture towards the open door of the Lethal Temple. "It was made for just your trouble, to answer the great riddle. Bon voyage!" Then after a pause, — "Did I believe in compulsion of any kind I'd have a questionnaire sent to everybody in Khartoum, a referendum vote (such as they used to take on having drink in America) on 'Is life worth living?' and to those who voted 'No' I'd order them one and all to the nearest lethal cham- ber. . . . By-by, old friend, and don't wait long. I shall follow you at the last possible moment, but not until I have had a hand in starting that old New World moving again on the newest of all designs where untold millions of happy new lives may be created and lived out. When you find that hoary old genius of Evil whom you pretend to warship, give him my THE LETHAL TEMPLE 63 compliments and tell him that we have reduced his followers in this world to a negligible handful like yourself of disap- pointed or reverting men and women, along with the followers of the God of Vengeance, the God of Mercy, and all the other compensation and makeshift gods of the old primitive humanity. We have relegated them all to the museums, as examples to our young of the fears and superstitions of that elder world from which they have fortunately escaped. Evil! . . . Life is so good at ninety that I begrudge each minute spent in sleep — or in foolish chatter hke this." His high musical voice faded away outside the walls of the temple enclosure, mingled with the tinkling laughter of his young companions, who without understanding very well what the old men had been discussing felt sure that old Felix (who was much loved) must be right. Chapter Three YOUTH I URROUNDED by this gay group of girls and boys the old man felt sure that he had been wasting good time in the melancholy company of the senile Claude and even in indulging sentimentally his own sad memories of the Lethal Temple. He went along with his young companions much more on a footing of equality than would have been possible in any older form of society. Thanks to a constantly improving hygiene, mental and physical, and to the universal absence of worry over the means of subsistence, age limitations and prejudices once so destructive to sympathy between differ- ent generations had largely vanished. Young and old of both sexes mingled everywhere at all times on an equal footing: all spirit was not supposed to be confined to the one or all wisdom to the other! The average life of the human being had been extended fully twenty years, but whereas formerly the effort had been merely to add to the average expectation of life, now the goal was to eliminate those distressing deteriorations of human tissue that once made the last twenty years of the human being an exist- ence rather than life. Instead of considering a human being fit only for the scrap heap at forty-five or fifty, which had been the ruthless verdict during the last hectic decades of the old world, it was now believed that a man or a woman was at that age just entering upon life's most fruitful and enjoyable phase when the results of preparatory efforts might be reaped. 64 YOUTH 65 Education instead of being crowded as a special discipline into a dozen or eighteen of the most immature years had been merged with the entire span of the individual's activities. Be- ginning literally in the cradle with the definite culture of the unconscious education persisted through manifold forms until the grave. In fact education — a term so little understood, so much abused in the old world — ^was no longer talked about as some- thing apart from other activities, to be wrangled over or theorized about or paraded as an accomplishment. That would be as foolish as talking about living apart from individual life! There were no more professional "educators," no more wordy battles between advocates of the "theoretic" and the "practical." All that sort of thing was considered as so much dust of old schoolmen. No doubt this new conception of education, eliminating altogether those years of formal drill, usually dreary and irk- some to youth or mere wasted time, the complete abolition of school as such, of college as a special sort of playground for privileged youth, had done much to break down artificial barriers between young and old, merging both in the one universal relationship of members of the same society. That form of education was held to be the most efficacious which was least conscious, acquired through the senses and the intelli- gence of the active human being, not abstractly through formulas. And as imitation must always remain the primary educational method, the free association and intercourse of all ages and conditions of individuals were essential. So instead of being turned over to governesses, tutors, and hired teachers, all specialists and socially limited persons, as in the old days, modern children and youth lived with their elders, played and argued with them, imitated them. Thus from early infancy the young, like domestic animals. ^ SOMETIME acquired unconsciously the communal habits of their tribe, as had been the custom of primitive peoples, who had thus pre- served intact their social organism, their tradition and religion through untold generations. The individual thus integrated into his human environment from the dawn of consciousness became inseparable from it, was moved by its impulses, gov- erned by its acquired wisdom and ideals — ^instead of "playing a lone game," "fighting for himself," "developing his indi- viduality," etc., etc. — ^in other words, trying to impose a willful egotism upon others and glorifying his own wayward desires. In these ways human society had evolved gradually into what to the old world mind would have appeared an impos- sible paradox, — anarchy within strict control! In government modern societies more nearly resembled what was once ab- horred as pure Anarchy than anything else, its separate units or enclaves being autonomous and self-governing, the appa- ratus of government everywhere being reduced to the mini- mtmi (and it was extraordinary how little of the old govern- ment machinery was needed, violence and personal greed hav- ing been definitely eliminated!) instead of growing like a can- cer until in the end it had throttled society itself. Within this free fluid frame of the modern world the individual was held in the firm grasp of tradition and social consciousness, which however greatly it might change content never relaxed its in- sistence. Don'ts had been supplanted by do's without the indi- vidual being aware of what guided him or ever questioning its validity. Prestige alone gave power in modern society, and prestige was purely personal, due neither to material advantages nor to the control of votes, — an intangible subtle quality, the supreme expression of personal character. Thus the old Greek, Felix, was one of the best known and most influential persons in Africa (or indeed in the entire civilized world) and young YOUTH 67 men and women, even the small children pressing around him on their way to the Lake this morning, were quite well aware of his importance, his distinction, but not in the least abashed by it, or made hypocritical by his presence among them. Nor was Felix himself conscious of his elevated position in the estimation of his contemporaries any more than he was conscious of the shape of his head or the size of his mouth. The project for the exploration of the forgotten continent of North America was associated with him because for so many years he had actively interested himself in it and furthered its accomplishment. The plan was known everywhere and dis- cussed with the liveliest interest and acute criticism. The long labors of preparation, technical and ethnological, were now almost completed; recently advance units of engineers and technicians had been despatched to the northern seaboard of America where it had been determined to make the first re- searches; Felix had annoimced his intention of visiting the scene of operations soon. . . . Information about essential matters such as this Expedition was widely disseminated in the modern world, which had per- fected numerous ways of transmitting knowledge instan- taneously so that it became part of the general consciousness of humanity, whether or not the individual was concerned immediately in the project. On the other hand, much that was considered news in the old world societies and thrust upon everybody's attention whether desired or not was ignored, — the sexual relationships of persons, their private quarrels, dis- graces, misfortunes, political and social rivalries, which made up nine tenths of old world "news." Even offenses against accepted conventions and habits of society were ignored as bad smells inadvertently emitted in a polite gathering would be ignored. It was, of course, no longer thought either feasible or de- 68 SOMETIME sirable to keep "the Public," that is, people in general, in the dark about important matters of policy affecting the whole social body, there being no longer the interests of selfish rival communities or of selfish and self-seeking individuals to con- sider. Whatever "diplomacy" remained in the social relations of different groups w^as open to the four winds of heaven: it was not considered an occult mystery whose effective work- ings must be hidden under subterfuges and mystifications of meaningless jargon. . . . So when one of the youngsters asked the old man, — "When are you going to America?" he could easily toss back, — "When everything is ready." "Next month?" "Or the month after ... a few months will make no differ- ence. The greater part of the continent has been under ice for centuries, only now becoming fit for human life. . . . Even Columbus, you remember, had a long time to wait before he could set sail on his first voyage." "Columbus didn't know where he was going — ^you do!" "We don't know what our discoveries will lead to, any more than Columbus did!" "I have seen the model of old New York in the museum," one youngster announced eagerly. "Will it look anything like that now?" His companions laughed at his simplicity. "Not much," Felix replied. "Just great mounds like the ones in our central park where Old Khartoum was, only bigger mounds I expect." "What's inside of them ?" the yoxmgster persisted. "That's what we intend to find out," Felix answered gently. "Rubbish I suppose, — steel and iron, concrete, bricks, perhaps human bones, and the machines they used. We hope to dis- cover how much like us those people were and just how they YOUTH 69 lived in those days. We know from the written records they left that there were a great many of them and that they were very proud of their engines and of their high buildings, much larger and taller buildings than any on the earth today. You must have seen pictures of them and of the people who lived in them?" "Oh, yes," the boy admitted, "but they aren't the real thing." "Maybe when you are older you can go over there and see for yourself what it is like. The exploration of that great land will not be completed in your lifetime." . . . A pretty dark-skinned girl exclaimed,— "It must be wonderful, a great empty country like that and a dead city! How I'd like to be going there! ... I suppose I shall never see all those places we have heard so much about." Felix smiled at the girl's eagerness and disappointment thus frankly expressed. She was eighteen, gloriously made and beau- tiful, perfect in the promise of physical life, and she wore the coveted gold thread edging her upper garment, which indi- cated — ^as every child knew — ^that she had been approved as a potential mother, had received her Permit, as it was called. She need not have children, if for personal reasons she pre- ferred the childless life, that of her less fortunate companions. But if as was likely she should desire to bear children, she was of that carefully chosen and strictly disciplined minority of her sex who between the ages of eighteen and forty-two might beget children with a suitable mate who had also received his Permit. She was free to select this father of her children from among the body of youths who had passed the test of parent- hood, but her choice must be approved before the union could take place. Otherwise, if she broke the rigid custom that controlled reproduction of the human race, she might suffer the disgrace and the sorrow of having her stillborn child taken from her and herself be sterilized as a prevention of further 70 SOMETIME misbehavior, like any ordinary woman who had failed to obtain a Permit or who wished to live a free life or who had been promiscuous before mating. Modern society for its own protection and improvement had gradually evolved these restrictions upon child-bearing and imposed them on everyone without favor. Outside of the limited number privileged to continue the race, men and women, once painlessly sterilized by the application of rays that in no way affected either bodily or mental character except the function of reproduction, were free to Uve as they hked. Once sterilized the individual's sex life was purely and entirely a private matter, of no social concern — and what is more noteworthy — not the subject of comment or criticism from others. . . . "If you are so keen, my dear, to see strange lands and lead a life of adventure, you are free to choose that way," Felix remarked gently, "There is nothing to prevent you — but you will have to give up wearing that pretty dress, which so be- comes you!" The girl fell back into the laughing group of her com- panions. They all knew that a young man who expected daily to obtain his fatherhood Permit had persuaded her to join him in the application for the certificate of parenthood which there was no doubt would be granted them. Thereafter for twenty years or more their lives would necessarily be fixed, both their lives, and all adventurous wanderings precluded. There were no fixed hours for work or recreation in this modern world, no punching of time clocks and watching of dials! Those engaged on special tasks that required concen- tration stayed with them long after ordinary working hours. Likewise everybody ate when and where it was most con- venient; the food booths for the distribution of essential meals YOUTH 71 could be found almost anywhere, and the quality of the foods prepared was of a uniform excellence as well as in generous variety. The preparation and distribution of food being under the control of the powerful department of public hygiene re- ceived the most careful attention. The doctrine that man is what he eats was taken seriously: no universal indigestions as among the ancient Americans were permitted to irritate the tranquil spirits of the people! No unhealthy superfluity nor degrading hunger distracted the modern man and woman. , . . So when at last Felix arrived with his young companions beside the Blue Lake there were a few late comers like himself on the broad beach while others were breakfasting in one of the pavilions scattered through the neighboring grove. The lovely dark-skiimed girl and her fair-haired blue-eyed lover had already dropped their simple garments at the water's edge and hand in hand were stepping into the clear water, instead of squirming on their bellies in the hot sand, indulging in a prolonged sexual irritation. The girl's bronze flesh glistened as the spray touched her. She was from the ancient people of Abyssinia, one of the purest of old world stocks, while her young lover came from a well-known Khartoum family that had descended from one of the last English governors of the Sudan, who had had children by an Arab woman. Ever so often according to the inescapable law of heredity the light hair and blue eyes and pale skin of this remote northern pro- genitor tvirned up in an almost pure form as in this young man. The couple thus briUiantly contrasted in coloring and type offered an admirable picture of modern youth. After playing for a time with some companions the couple swam off towards one of the wooded islands where they might take their breakfast. Such intimacy as this, however, would "mean nothing" in the evasive terminology of a more licentious 72 SOMETIME age. The blond lover of the dark Abyssinian girl would never think of transgressing the strict tabu that separated lovers sexually until they were ready to be mated, any more than he would indulge in amorous license with his mother or sister. Of course this strict tabu had been broken — ^incest was not unknown in Christian societies — but instances of such trans- gression were so rare and so abhorred that the mere idea of it never entered the consciousness of a young lover or of a girl, unmated and unsteriUzed, who wore the white chiton with the gold thread. It was as if both were hypnotically inhibited, parted for the time from each other's body and from all sexual play, as is the habit of many females among the animals. With the tabu thus firmly operative youth was as unconscious of sex as birds in flight. What was deemed modesty in the modern world was some- thing quite different from anything so considered by older civilized peoples, although a like understanding might have been found in more primitive societies whose ideas of procrea- tion and sexual relationships had not yet been perverted by contact with so-called Christian ideals! Modesty was complete unconsciousness of the body, the only form of modesty with any intrinsic value. The naked brown girl playing in the water with her fair-skinned lover, floating on her back, her firm breasts upturned to his gaze, was as unconscious of her- self as the new-born child or as the ripe woman passionately absorbed in the embrace of her mate. This altogether desirable simplicity about sexual functions — and the lack of gossip upon such matters, of sex pruriency in general — was in large part due, no doubt, to the custom of sterilization of all males and females other than the select few chosen to carry on the race. After sterilization had taken place (that is, usually after the eighteenth year), which was necessary for the protection and YOUTH 73 the improvement of the race, it was obviously no one's business vifhat the individual, male or female, did about his sex life, any more than with his other appetites, unless they manifested themselves in socially objectionable ways. Inevitably there had evolved refinements, aesthetic and indi- vidual variations in sex habits as in all other matters. There was much the same wide variety in the sex habits of the human race that there had always been since consciousness had first modified primitive impulse: there were promiscuous and monogamic types of sexual union, the casual lovers as well as the romantic and ideahzing kind. But as there was no longer any reason for curiosity about the sex life of another, everyone male or female being unhindered in satisfying the sex impulse as he or she might desire, this variety of sexual habits had no evil effects upon society in general. One potent cause why the modern individual could accomplish as much as he did so easily — one basis for the high level of health of body and mind — ^was that humanity was no longer teased and tortured by sex obsessions and repressions as had been the case with ninety percent of the human race between the years of six- teen and sixty in the older types of civilization. (And as the "struggle for life" had intensified in those older civilizations the distortions due to sex aberrations had alarmingly in- creased.) Now men and women were free to concentrate their energies on more essential matters than their couplings! Even more remarkable to the ancient type of mind would be the almost total absence of sex jealousies in modern life, and of all so-called passional crimes. To account for such an amelioration in human conduct is difficult because the cause of these distressing abnormalities was more obscure than any- thing else in the psychology of the old world. One obvious reason for the change was emancipation from the "possession" obsession. Men and women no longer strove 74 SOMETIME to own each other any more than they did physical property. A romantic comedy such as Shakspere's Winter's Tale (and most of the romantic Hterature of the nineteenth century) seemed to the modern understanding morbid or childish, deal- ing as it did exclusively with man's inordinate sense of owner- ship in some female or desire for such ownership. Moderns either laughed at such stories (also at the Elizabethans' preoccupation with the cuckold theme) or were bored by it, as they were with Boccaccio's tales of sly, deceitful men and women and the cheats they plotted in order to sleep with some forbidden person. The elimination of the property idea simplified enormously the sex relation. The female no longer traded her sex for sup- port by a man or for social ambition. Neither man nor woman was rendered more desirable as mate because of what he or she might happen to possess other than intrinsic qualities. The coarse disturbance of material advantage — of profit — ^being eliminated from the sex relation it reverted to its natural and strongest element, — that of mutual attraction and mutual fit- ness, of compatibility and charm, — to the essential and the eternal. Just here came the most curious and distinctive psychological differentiation between the new civilization and the old, a change however not entirely incomprehensible to a few mem- bers of the older society. For there had always been occasional instances of the perfect sex relation in every previous form of human society, — a relation based on mutual attraction, mutual help, and respect, unaffected by material considerations, tran- scending mere physical appetite. Such happy lovers and successful mates always realized that love was not simply a state of nervous and physical excitement, to be created with any chance comer of pleasing form. They knew that even the physical satisfactions of love might be had YOUTH 75 in perfection only when both the man and the woman were mutually desirous and mutually loving apart from desiring gratification. No man— still less a woman— might have a happy experience in love with a companion not attuned to a like pitch of desire and similarly inflamed by a single concentrated passion. Yet this basic condition of all successful sex experience had not been generally recognized — ^witness among many proofs the institution of public prostitution! — in the old dispensation where so many men and women were wont to satisfy purely animal cravings wherever they could. It was commonly held then that "sex urge," without what were contemptuously called "emotional thrills," was sufficient for self-satisfaction (and in most cases even of lawful matrimonial intercourse between the sexes nothing more than self-gratification was sought!). But now that sex had become quite free, without either social or economic inhibitions, those superior types of human beings who demanded something more than physical satisfaction might find mates with whom to attain emotional ecstasy as well as physical release. More exact unions were aimed at and accomplished. And once the delight of such emotionalized unions had become customary — also easily ob- tainable — less the brute sex rut, emptying itself in legal and extralegal channels as of old, became possible. Thus all sorts of refinements of sex relations had developed. "Love" was greatly evolved under these circumstances, as well as simplified. Every refinement of the love relation being cerebral led to a greater degree of singleness and continuity of union. Naturally not all persons developed at the same pace or attained the same levels. Many of the coarser types of erotic indulgence persisted, especially in out of the way corners, where the newer concepts of satisfactory love relations had not yet penetrated. 76 SOMETIME Some men and women in the grip of the periodic sex rut still gratified their senses indiscriminately, although the great improvement in personal hygiene had gradually lessened over- sexuality in the species; as such excesses harmed no one but the perpetrators they vi^ere not condemned, nor socially ostra- cized, nor were these indulgences concealed through shame. Such sensualists were merely considered gluttons, coarse lovers, and they were pitied for missing the finer forms of sex union. . . . As for jealousy, the perfect union being based wholly on mutual desire and mutual satisfaction the individual man or woman lost that keen sense of resentment because of failure to win another human being to his or her embrace. It was perceived that happiness could not lie in that direction for either. If mutual love was not aroused there was no incentive to a one-sided covetousness, and revenge when its object was unfulfilled. Wherever, as with children or pet animals, jealousy persisted it was deemed a subject for laughter. Thus the shoe was put on the cuckold's other foot! It was obvious that nobody could take from another what that one had never really had or once having enjoyed had failed to retain. So jealous wives and sweethearts, alimony hunting and breach-of-promise harpies — ^those ridiculous and painful characters of Christian civilization — who sought to obtain by law a money compensa- tion for illusory "rights," had entirely disappeared, to the vast improvement of social decorum and decency. Not everybody, naturally, was able to obtain the perfect union desired, any more than other great prizes, but failure in love life was neither humiUating nor a cause for hatred and revenge. Those human emotions, so wasted in older societies, now went directly into the enrichment and refine- ment of sex relations, which existed in an extraordinary variety YOUTH 77 and closeness of adaptation to the personal needs of the individuals concerned. There were no longer the rough categories of "married" and "unmarried," of "pure" and "licentious," of Hcit and illicit relationships, mistresses, prostitutes, etc., into which society had once tried to compress this most delicate and basic of human relations. Instead, an infinite variety of subtly discriminated relations had taken their place, each individual. Instead of the lover proposing to himself (or herself) the stale categories of marriage or "free love," their imaginations played about the ideal of the unique form of union possible for them. Instead of an illicit "affair," ephemeral and coarsening, or the dull per- spective of an uncongenial marriage, half economic bondage and half sexual combat, they envisaged themselves as lifelong lovers, with an extended vista of ripening years — if successful. But if for any reason this aspiration was defeated neither humiliation nor bitterness resulted to prevent other, more suitable engagements with life. It was notable, however, how many of these modern matings, not merely among the child- bearing who had the buttress of offspring, but quite as numer- ously among the sterilized who had nothing but mutual consent to bind them together, endured monogamically through long periods. Those who broke off a union and embarked upon another were not derided nor despised. When infidelity — or even pro- miscuity — occurred such license was by private understanding and passed unnoticed. The premium upon deception or fur- tiveness in sexual matters had sunk to the neghgible. Why be sly or deceitful or hypocritical about something when the individual gained nothing by it but self-contempt? Thus sex in the new world was something much less than it had been in older societies — and something infinitely more! 78 SOMETIME And much time was saved, for the individual was no longer worried about his sex life. Veronica was sipping a glass of fruit juices and nibbling at one of the delectable new varieties of vegetable fruits that had become a popular form of breakfast dish. The table beneath a thickly-leaved old laurel tree was strewn with flower petals of an almost black-purple color that contrasted with the pale green lacquer of the table. Some of these petals were as large as saucers, and on them were spread out ginger-colored wafer bread and coral berries. On the groimd beside Veronica crouched the slight figure of the girl Alisa, her head resting against the older woman. There were traces of tears on the girl's sensitive face. When Felix appeared Veronica smiled at him and indicated a seat across the table. "Why so late, Felix.? You are usually among the first." "I should have done better to come here directly instead of straying from my path!" Thereupon he related briefly his visit to the Lethal Temple and his conversation there with old Claude. . . . "And in the end I had to leave him to his fate. Too bad that after his long life — ^not badly spent on the whole — he should fail to make his personal account balance like that!" "You remember that his only son came to the same conclu- sion a few years ago." "I had forgotten." "He missed getting his Permit and had some trouble with a girl — something like that. . . . Claude's wife left him after the birth of that one child, preferred another mate, and Claude instead of following her example and making a new adjust- ment had himself sterilized and shifted about with one woman YOUTH 79 and another. . . . There must have been a strain of melan- choly in the family." The old man's face became grave as he Ustened to these de- tails of his old friend's misadventures. He murmured dully,— "I wonder if there are many Uke him, believers in the essen- tial evil of human existence ?" "I have run across a few of them here and there," Veronica admitted, "but considering the prevalence of some form of insanity in many of the stocks from which modern humanity has descended it would take far more than a mere thousand years, even with our strict control of breeding, to eradicate all such traces of morbidity from the human family. There is al- ways suflScient strain and stress in even the luckiest life to bring out any latent weakness. . . . Well, Alisa!" she re- marked interrogatively to the girl who had risen from her crouching position and was gazing fixedly at the far horizon. "You had better run along; I'll overtake you at the Hygiene building in a few minutes." The girl without bidding either one adieu set off imder the trees, with the fixed stare of the sleepwalker. When she had passed out of sight Veronica said, — "It's hard for her to make up her mind." "Her appeal failed.?" Veronica nodded. "Everything was done to stretch the requirements in her favor. They even sent all the data to the Bagdad and Delhi laboratories for an impartial study. The reply was the same from both, — 'an unwise risk.' So I've been trying to brace her up to have it done this morning and over with it!" "I hope Paul cares enough for the girl to stick to her," the old man remarked. "Paul has an A one record with the double star. He would 8o SOMETIME be a great fool if he did have himself sterilized. His children will go far!" Felix winced slightly at his companion's bluntness. "There are other blessings, other preferments than that of parenthood," he protested. "You yourself did not choose an- other mate after your man was killed." "Remember I had had two children and ten happy years aheady!" "And I hope a few happy years since, without babies," Felix suggested tenderly. "Another kind of happiness, that of a calm eventide. . . . Perhaps better than when I was bearing my children." She smiled back at the old man reassuringly. "There is a sureness, a richness to love in the maturer years that one never dreams of at Alisa's age. There are so many unexplored ways of lov- ing to be discovered then! . . . But I must hurry over to the Hygiene laboratory to see that this little girl doesn't flinch, and then get back to my job. . . . When are you coming over to see my neophytes ?" "Perhaps this evening if the council meeting isn't too long." "Good! You must spend the night. The girls and some boys are putting on a great show and will be delighted to have you there." The old man adapted his nimble step to Veronica's nervous stride, as they followed the winding path beside the lake shore that the girl had just taken. . . . "I don't beheve in sentimentalizing these little personal con- tretemps," the woman began in her pleasant positive voice. "Even if Paul should prefer not to lose the chance of begetting his own children, that is nothing for Alisa to snivel about. She is a clever, attractive little thing and will find plenty of young fellows in her class ready to make love to her, if she wants that! And she is free to take up any sort of work she is YOUTH 8i fitted for. She could join the Expeditionary Force and run a camp in your new continent. . . . Compare her fate with that of the superfluous spinster woman in the old world, who had to become a school-teacher or nurse or interior decorator, and if she wanted sex had to sneak it in illicitly by some dirty subterfuge. No, there is a great deal to be said in favor of the sterilized life for most women." "All the same when a girl wants to have children like Alisa it is hard on her to be told that for some obscure scientific reason she is not fitted to have them. ... I wonder if we have not gone too far, if our tests have not become too rigid and mechanical. Those biologists are terribly cocksure fellows, yet the history of their science shows clearly enough how often they have had to change their notions about the laws of in- heritance. . . . They may not yet have hit upon the ultimate truth as to the proper number and arrangement of genes for favorable reproduction. I feel inclined to give these rejected girls a chance in the New Continent." Veronica stopped and turning squarely about looked criti- cally at her companion. "And let them have all the children they could, no matter what the quality was!" . . . Veronica's laughter was tinged with a silvery scorn that made passers-by turn to look at the pair, which was strictly contrary to good modern manners. . . . "Pretty soon, Fehx, you will be coming out as an Expan- sionist and an advocate of free matings!" "You know I don't mean anything like that. ... But why not let every woman have at least one child— and then if neces- sary sterilize them.? ... It is true that occasionally highly desirable variants result from unpromising matings. . . . Many instances of that exceptional organism which used to be called 82 SOMETIME genius were the fruit of extremely uneugenic parents. . . . Somehow the race stream does purify itself of taints — " "After many generations, having broadcast inferior strains meanwhile that society has to contend with!" Veronica broke in witheringly. "I am amazed at you, Felix! . . . Don't you talk this kind of stuff to my girls. They would think you are getting senile!" With this last dart she disappeared into the outer court of a low building, leaving Felix to pursue his way to his own quarters among the laboratories and the museums at the farther end of the university compoimd. The Public Hygiene oflBce was one of the earlier buildings situated near the site of old Khartoum on a gentle rise of ground beside the White Nile, which now emptied into the Lake as well as the Blue Nile. The winding course of this great river could be traced from the elevation on which the Hygiene building stood far to the south, reaching out like a sluggish serpent towards the distant heart of the continent. On either side lay the fertile fields that supplied the metropolis with all that variety and abundance of materials needed for its existence (for although transportation was swift and cheap it was the aim of each modern community to serve itself as far as possible in all primary substances). The skillful use of irri- gation and of reforestation had converted what had once been largely a sandy desert into one of the most highly fertile regions of the world. . . . The Public Hygiene building being one of the oldest struc- tures in the new city was at some distance from the center of the university settlement. It was in what was called "old style," built, that is, of blocks of a reddish sandstone brought from distant quarries in the North, but not of the oldest style, a few specimens of which in mud blocks still survived. The YOUTH 83 red surface of the building which must have been at least three hundred years old had been scoured by the hot winds that were common before reforestation. These weathered surfaces were now draped with flowering vines that cascaded from the low flat roofs and fell in festoons along the walls or looped themselves to neighboring palm trees making of the low build- ing a picturesque ruin. The old Greek's eyes rested apprecia- tively on the irregular lines of the structure, which he preferred to the more recent and fantastic experiments in architecture at his own end of the settlement. These more modern buildings were made of a colored viscous substance that was poured and molded into any desired shape with in- credible ease and rapidity, offering a great variety of design and color and lending itself admirably to external decoration. This glasslike substance of all shades of color was much better adapted for building than stone, brick, or cement and far more durable than mud. But the ancient stone buildings erected four or five hundred years after the Ice Age, as com- fortable living conditions had again become possible for human beings, had a dignity and charm to them that the newer im- provisations somehow lacked. The people who had erected these old stone buildings had worked under severe limitations of transport and material, and severe limitations have always encouraged fine art. Their builders were happily trained on the best models of preceding civilizations, the Egyptian and the Greek, which almost alone had escaped the rigors of the glacial period. Most of the medieval and the renaissance build- ing had succumbed and although some specimens of Indian and Chinese architecture had survived these did not appeal to the cosmopoHtan taste of the Africans. . . . The culmination of the Christian era had begotten those monstrosities of steel and cement of which the Americans especially were so inordinately proud. They built them arro- 84 SOMETIME gantly towards the sky to insane heights, terraced them and lighted them electrically, and lived out their lives, millions of them, within these immense human warrens. Now they existed merely in models reconstructed for historical museums, as curious examples of human extravagance, symbols of a dead civilization. Felix never looked at them or at pictures of the city skylines made by them without marveling at the strange mentahty of the race that could not only create such monstrosities, but take the inordinate pride they did in their achievement. The one supreme effort of that period had been towards size and num- bers. To be sure the earth at that time was rapidly becoming packed in its more favored localities with a swarm of an in- ferior grade of humanity, but even in America the population had not yet reached the density where such huge barracks in which human beings were condemned to spend their lives were necessary. There was still sufficient free land over which to scatter their teeming millions had they desired to enjoy air and light and escape the swarming crowds. And many of the common evils of that decaying civilization might have been avoided or deferred indefinitely had their architects and engineers and rulers never perpetrated these abnormalities of building. In modern days mankind no longer had the temptation to house themselves in such huge towers of steel and mud. Thanks to a slow recovery from the devastations of the Ice Age and the much reduced population to be cared for, herd- ing was no longer either necessary or permitted. Society was in no danger of becoming choked with its own bulk, as had once been the case. The builders of the new world with Egyptian and Greek temples and a few specimens of early renaissance building alone left for their contemplation had their imaginations YOUTH 85 turned definitely from mere size, bulk, the fantasy of the monstrous, back to the earth where building properly be- longed, to the adaptation of man's shell to his environment on the surface of this earth. Thus the architect and builder once more regained that sense of moderation and of purpose which prevented them from indulging in grotesque exaggera- tion just because a technical command of their materials permitted such extravagance and because a diseased state of society found profit in so housing humanity in immense tower- ing barracks. The modern builder sought rather to hide his structures, to merge his creations with the earth, in color and design. No longer was the "individualistic" whim of the archi- tect or owner tolerated. For building of any sort was now considered a public affair in which the best interests of the community as a whole must be considered. Plans for any new building or for alterations of an old one must be submitted to different controls, represent- ing the interests of landscape, architecture, sanitation, etc., in order that nothing disfiguring or wasteful, that might inter- fere with the symmetry and harmony of the community, should be perpetrated. And if by accident a displeasing or useless building was erected, it was as easy — and as cheap — under modern conditions to remove as to erect buildings, and there being no vested interests to cater to, a modern community could reform its outer garment as completely and as often as desired, just as the individual renewed his clothes. No building was considered untouchable just because it had got itself erected! If anything better could be suggested, if the occupied space was wanted for something more convenient or beautiful ---the two aims were not beHeved to be antagonistic — ^the undesirable building was quickly demolished by the use of acids sprayed from the air and concentrated heat so that 86 SOMETIME in a brief time a substantial structure would crumble from sight. . . . The pervasive cupidity that had been the key motivation of all old world cultures being removed, the private interests of the individual were not permitted to block whatever was be- lieved beneficial to public welfare. So the whimsies or the greeds of individual citizens were never allowed to disfigure the ensemble determined for the community. The details of modern economy differed so universally from what had pre- vailed in the old "individualistic" societies that it would be impossible to enumerate the manifold changes that had taken place in man's treatment of his physical habitat. No longer disfiguring transmission lines were strung hap- hazardly like gigantic spiders' webs across every horizon, for they were no longer used to transmit power. No longer stacks of brick or cement towered into the blue sky emitting clouds of dirty smoke! No longer was the surface of the earth criss- crossed with a web of ugly cement highways, unshaded and lined with unsightly shacks. Almost all transport was through the air, which was both cheaper and swifter, and advertising was not needed in any form and would have been considered a breach of social good manners. It was not considered either sensible or civil to bore another with insistent and extravagant claims on behalf of this or that human product. Sozodont toothpaste or Phaethon gas or Neapolitan icecream or Cleopatra cigarettes, or any of the impudent promotions of the skilled advertiser, no longer were blazoned and dinned into the human consciousness. For there was no longer any neces- sity — or any profit — in selling anybody anything! The factory and its melancholy satellite the factory town had long since disappeared. Thanks to a controlled and orderly development of industry, making use solely of the best tech- nological discoveries, the omnipresent factory that at one time YOUTH 87 threatened to eat up society like a cancer had been reduced to unobjectionable proportions. All necessary goods — a great, great many things once made and foisted on mankind were no longer wanted and others were made by hand — were manu- factured in small unobtrusive establishments placed where they could function without being pubhc nuisances and ruinous to the happiness of their operatives. For men no longer lived to work or slave for others nor worked and slaved in order to get a bare subsistence. Subsistence, and more, was guaranteed with life itself. And ideas of comfort and personal satisfaction no longer required anything like the bewildering complexity of goods once con- sidered necessary for human happiness. The modern mind would not know what to do with at least eighty percent of the contraptions and gewgaws and pretentious gadgets once to be found in American stores and warehouses, — ^whose in- tensive multiplication was believed necessary not merely for human happiness but for the continued working of human economy! They were in fact, at least three-fourths of them„ mere rubbish cluttering the earth and created to satisfy appe- tites that had been unhealthily stimulated in idle minds by meretricious advertising. It was truly remarkable how many of what had once been considered "essential economic wants" had been eliminated without diminishing any real mental or spiritual interest. Rather with the effect of quickening these and affording more time for their enjoyment, as in ancient Greece where the common citizen could sit entire days in a theater listening to tragedies and comedies. . . . To this conclusion FeUx invariably came in his meditations over the contrasting civilizations of the past and the present, which he had made it his business to understand. The present was in a sense a return to the civilization of his ancestors that 88 SOMETIME had once held sway for a few happy centuries in a corner of the ancient world. There as here the public rather than the private building received the efforts of architect and builder. There as here men were content with a simple form of material life, judged by later standards, but they thronged their beau- tiful temples and theaters and places of public assembly. There as here men did not weigh their civilization solely in terms of "economic wants" to be "satisfied," but in ideas, in aesthetic and spiritual satisfactions. . . . In short modern men differed from any of their forerunners on the earth, enormously, so greatly that although they pos- sessed the same physiological and biological characteristics, and many of the same limitations as their human ancestors, they could hardly be described in the same terms or their life compared with what once had been called life. From the moment of waking at dawn until at nightfall he fell into sleep, modern man thought different thoughts, felt different impulses, formulated different purposes from old world meij, — ^lived in a physical environment, with a mental preoccupa- tion totally other than let us say the New Yorker of 1940 a.d. Naturally these profound changes in human mentality ex- pressed themselves most obviously in the environment which men made for themselves. Being spiritually such different creatures men must perforce create corresponding differences in their physical shell. But as always one must come back to the ultimate core of differentiation, — the quality and the con- tent of the spirit activating the human being. Modern man with his modern spirit within shaped for his needs a society that in detail as well as a whole had never existed on this earth before the last Ice Age ... a much more varied and har- monious and pleasing one be it said! . . . "It all comes down to the fact," the old Greek mused as he approached the entrance to his own building, which had YOUTH 89 recently been erected to serve the company of specialists at work on the Great Expedition, "to the basic differentiation between our modern world and that so-called New World that we intend presently to excavate, which is — " "What ?" demanded a deep voice, coming from a handsome powerfully built middle-aged man, who had overtaken Felix's leisurely footsteps. "Was I talking to myself. Chief?" the old man laughed. "That's a trick I got as a boy, repeating the hnes of Homer for a country schoolmaster, who had revived the habit of com- mitting literature to memory. I used to run about the fields of my native Ceos declaiming Homer. . . . Like most old folks I must be reverting to the habits of my youth !" "And what is the basic differentiation?" "Why, just this commonplace: today man is no longer bound to self. We no longer consider everything presented to us from a personal and subjective point of view. It is not always my and mine, but oursl Not my building, my business, my home, my wife — ^but ours." "Our wife too," mocked the younger man. "At least hers as much as mine. . . . It's no longer an ex- clusively my kind of world. And that's very good!" "That wasn't the doctrine of that American President, one of the last, whom they called 'the Great Engineer' because he ran them all into the abyss. You recall him — ^he was called Boover or Buncom or something like that. You remember how he talked incessantly of the virtues of a 'robust individualism,' which meant letting the strong eat as much as they liked at the expense of the weak ?" Felix nodded. "Exactly! And his doctrine led straight to chaos. . . . Lately I have been reexamining the records of his time, which was a quite crucial epoch for that vigorous people. Not merely this 90 SOMETIME Buncom fellow (who I take it was intellectually a quite com- monplace person, not to say stupid) but most of the leading minds of that epoch sincerely believed that only by the exclu- sive appeal to man's greed, to the individualistic spirit, could mankind progress and society be held together. And with this obsession rooted deep and constantly encouraged by education — although there were innumerable contradictions to their philosophy which they ignored — they made the most mon- strous civilization ever known, built on grab, individually and nationally, until it suddenly, swiftly collapsed, confuting their theories. . . . "How astonished old Hokum would be if he could drop in on us this morning and find a world running with a tenth of the fuss and misery and clutter of his, without his one magic prescription of stimulating human greed and cupidity and lust for power. I'd like the opportunity of showing the Fat Head (as they also called him!) that the sole way to make things move is not by bribing human selfishness. . . . But I am dawdling unconscionably this morning. I have spent most of the forenoon in ways that Mr. Hokum and his advisers would no doubt have considered pure waste. I haven't performed a single 'constructive' act — you know how fond they were in America of that word 'constructive'.? They thought it meant the same thing as 'creative'! Build something no matter what was their idea. They were fearfully 'constructive'!". . . Their slow progress to the old man's private wing was halted in one of the forecourts of the widespread building by a group of the younger workers, who were sipping refreshing sherbets in the shade. They hailed him and nothing loath the old man and his companion joined the circle around the large bowl of foaming purple snow. "A new wrinkle," one of the younger men explained, hand- ing Felix a cup of the purple ice. "We don't have to send to YOUTH 91 Uganda or the Himalayas any more for pure snow. They've got a snow machine and set it working in the cellar to make ices and sherbets." "Tastes enough like the real article," the old man agreed sipping his sherbet with satisfaction. . . . "Anything new from over there?"— a swift turn of the head indicated the direction of the old New World— "I haven't had any bulletins this morning." A young woman secretary replied, — "One of the preUminary scouting parties returned yesterday to New York headquarters from the far West. They report that as we foresaw the thawing of the Ice Cap has proceeded quite irregularly. All the high plateau from the Arctic Circle southwards as far as the site of old St. Louis is still a glacial swamp." "That simplifies the task by so much," the old man com- mented indifferently. "As far as I can recollect there was very little in that great central plain of enduring human interest or value." "How about Chicago?" objected one of the young men, who was attached to the topographical survey engaged in preparing enlarged copies of old North American maps for the use of the Expedition. "I should suppose that might be worth dig- ging up." "It is reported to be well within the swamp area, which is slowly draining out towards the ocean. . . . You will have to restrain your curiosity about that old hog-butchering metropo- lis another decade or two, Arnold!" remarked another of the young men. "No great loss," Felix commented softly. "It was always a kind of swamp there, socially as well as physically. It came from a swamp at the end of the last glacial period and it has 92 SOMETIME sunk once again into its native ooze. Let it stay there for another while!" "But towards the close of the Christian epoch there were around three millions of people living there," retorted the young man who had been addressed as Arnold. "A marvelous conglomerate of every known living race on the earth at that time. I have just been looking at a learned treatise published in 1892 on the number of different languages spoken in the city. . . . Chicago had many laboratories, more transportation systems than any other city in the world, and of course numer- ous specimens of those skyhitting buildings Americans were so fond of erecting even where they had plenty of land. . . . Also I have read of a collection of fantastic structures they made to celebrate their one himdredth birthday, things with immense wings like birds in colored stripes and roofs sup- ported by chains. Fiercely grotesque things like drawings per- petrated by small children — ^but they must have been curious all the same. What they called 'modernistic' architecture!" "Well, you'll have to dive into the mud to find them," some- body interjected. "Chicago always considered itself the most progressive of all American centers though one of the newest," continued the advocate of Chicago. "I know, I know," Felix murmured in a rather impatient tone. "It was fond of boasting, a very talkative city, always blowing its own horn as they used to say in their argot. All citizens of the United States did that more or less, but Chicago was the worst blower. ... I can't seem to recall any distin- guished person identified with Chicago, however, anybody who left a name on the world record of achievement, except a woman who started there a famous experiment in social rela- tions at the end of the nineteenth century, what they called a 'Social Settlement,' where some generous-minded persons of YOUTH 93 the more privileged class tried living among the slave masses. An early sign of discontent with the prevailing philosophy of their ow^n class! But for all her efforts the leading citizens among her contemporaries called her a crank, vi^hich was the term of opprobrium they used for anyone who did what the majority disapproved of. They considered her a dangerous citizen, although to millions throughout the world she was the only distinguished product of Chicago! . . . "As I remember, Chicago's one other historical importance was the melancholy episode of the anarchists, which occurred a number of decades before its end. They murdered with due judicial forms a Uttle band of social rebels, whom they dubbed in their ignorant way 'Anarchists,' in one of those spasms of brutal fear that now and then swept through that enormous democracy. That event put 'Anarchy' on the map, so to speak, in the New World. What this people did in the way of perse- cution of harmless and often intelligent and admirable victims of their social disapprobation would take long to tell. . . . Yes, the fate of those anarchists remains for us of today the most significant fact about this old swampland city. For ac- cording to their notions we should all be called anarchists, everybody living in our new world, and we should be lucky if we had escaped with our lives, had we tried to live then as we do now! That juror ruba — ^hate of the 'reds' — was a fearful passion to arouse, all the worse because it was so blind, so ignorant of the thing attacked. , . . "Later on there was another famous instance of this red fury in a more enlightened part of the country, where they murdered two poor Italians, one a shoemaker and another a fish peddler, because they admitted having social convictions contrary to the prevailing opinions about such matters, and they kept a couple of poor devils in prison — and what hells their prisons were! — ^for their lives out in California . . .oh, 94 SOMETIME the disease was rampant all over, especially severe after their great war to make democracy safe. . . . "I am rambling on as I always do once I get started about these old social superstitions. The amazing thing when you consider it was that they thought themselves to be 'broad' and 'progressive,' their favorite words, and yet they were as unrea- sonable and intolerant, as narrow-minded and as brutal, as the Spanish fiends who ravished so much of the continent after its discovery and wiped out every trace of the interesting cul- tiu-es they found there among the aborigines. There was little to choose between Cortes and his rapscallions and the leaders of American democracy who murdered the Chicago anarchists, did Sacco and Vanzetti to death, tortured Mooney in a Cali- fornia prison. . . . Well, thank God (as they used to say) — that God they were always calling upon to justify any special atrocity! — the world do move — ^forward at last!" "All the same," the young admirer of old Chicago put in, "where there was so much doing — ^and all in one brief century — there ought to be something worth digging up and ex- amining!" "That I may say is a characteristic delusion of the colonially minded," the old man remarked placidly. "The American people more than any other of whom we have records were wholly under the delusions of grandeur, really convinced that mere size, mere motion, mere noise, was of itself significant, somehow important! That mere numbers and running to and fro aimlessly, volubility, big buildings, excitement, nervous ex- haustion, all meant what they called civilization, human prog- ress. Their learned men, rather I should say their university heads, boasted of the numbers attending their institutions as did the promoters of their sports. When finally distress over- took them, the unwieldy machine they had built became unmanageable, their richest citizen could think of nothing YOUTH 95 better to do to help his starving, unemployed fellow citizens than to erect a mammoth entertainment park in a vast struc- ture tovi^ering into the sky! (That, by the -way, is one of their monuments I am most curious to look into, if there is anything left in its special rubbish heap.)" The group under the scathing denunciation delivered by the old man in cool impersonal tones became silent for a few^ moments. The old Greek resumed in culminating mockery, — "Those busy Chicagoans, the most intelligent among them, would be surprised to find us sitting here sipping our cooling ices in the forenoon of a busy work day, chatting about ancient history as we have been doing! How they would have de- nounced us as wastrels, as after tossing off one of their infernal fiery liquids they rushed for an elevator to whisk them forty or fifty stories to an office artificially lighted, warmed or cooled, there to sit 'in conference' about nothing of any human im- portance ! "And yet I dare say we moderns get through three times as much real work, weighed in the measure of enduring accom- plishment, each day as any of their high pressure executives ever thought of doing. We have eliminated so much waste motion, so much mere paper handling, the dictating and reading of letters, so much futile hedging and scheming for personal advantage. They might have admired many of our labor-saving machines, but they would have used the leisure thus won for more futilities. They could not have understood our indifference to mere flurry and bustle, to busyness in itself, nor have valued our ideals of calm, serenity, contemplative thought, nor our sense of pure enjoyment in life itself, in the golden moments slipping through our ripened consciousness! . . . We could have done all their real work in a couple of hours a day, at the most, and have had all the rest of our wak- ing time for real living, — for the theater for one thing, which 96 SOMETIME the Americans patronized only for the sake of an emotional stimulant, a shot to their jaded nerves. . . . But as always I ramble on, my children. Some day you will shut me up in a Lethal Chamber and let me talk there to the ghosts of the past to my fill!" His audience laughed indulgently over the old man's con- sciousness of his desultory mood. Some of the group slipped away about their pursuits, but one of the young women who lingered exclaimed, — "All the same I'd like to see anything so different from what we have today as that Chicago, even if it is buried in a swamp!" "Be thankful that you are privileged to be sitting here within sound of that fountain, with this amazing display of onyx- colored walls, sipping this deUcious ice! . . . I suppose Chicago did epitomize the life of that strange American people, of machines and men and women turning themselves into more machines, of scurry and whirr — and constant physical discom- fort. They had developed the machine ideal of life more com- pletely to its terrible conclusions than any other people, although all were hellbent (as they used to say) to follow in the same path to destruction. They were all aping the Amer- ican civilization at the end in the pathetic delusion that in some magic way the machine would save them. It did not! It could not save a mankind cursed with that mentality, with that tradi- tion. If the Ice Age had not intervened the result would have been much the same — dissolution. Until men got themselves new minds and became masters, instead of slaves of their own creations, they could not make the New World, which is ours. "That Chicago place, now a mere spot on the map of a huge glacial swamp, was chiefly remarkable, not for its big slaughterhouses for preparing animal foods — a noisome habit Jn itself! — nor for its lofty buildings, nor for its busyness and smoking chimneys which covered it with a filthy sooty cloud YOUTH 97 much of the time obscuring the sky, but as a terrible illustration of the squalid result of an inhuman social system ruthlessly appUed. There in Chicago the industriaUzed Christian system of living attained its full development. And Chicago even before the sudden advance of the Ice Cap overwhelmed it was rapidly reverting to primitive savagery. "For the richer classes, who had benefited by machine ex- ploitation of human resources, and their poUtical hireUngs had so completely looted its civic treasury that there was no means to pay for essential services. With their police disbanded who had formerly kept a semblance of order, their firefighters dismissed, school-teachers starving, even their water system failing because of lack of coal, the city was slumping with appalling rapidity to a condition of filth, lawlessness, and degradation comparable only with the slower descent of the Roman Empire into barbarism. Chicagoans had always gone armed about their private affairs (contrary to law) — an inherit- ance of pioneer days — ^but now there were formed hired gangs, of former police and other thugs, who sold their services to anyone who could afford to hire them for his own protection and for robbing others, very much what always happened on the break-up of every older civilization. "This condition of violence— we might call it social chaos- was already well under way in 1933 a.d.— the very year, you may remember, in which Chicago was celebrating in those weird structures along its lake its centenary. . . . "No, no, I am more and more convinced the longer I study their own records that there can be little or nothing in that particular swamp of the old New World worth uncovering, nothing that we have not already descriptions and models of in our ethnographical museum. And I hope that you young- sters are not getting too much excited over what we are likely to find in any portion of the North American continent. There 98 SOMETIME was an extraordinary increase in the number of lives over that part of the v\^orld's surface between its first discovery by Euro- peans and the last Ice Age, say, for four and a half centuries. But singularly little of enduring human value, of beauty, was created there. "Those United States of America (to give them their full ofl&cial title) were hardly more than a huge experiment station in what they called the democratic form of government. We should consider their social system anything but democratic in its working out ! It degenerated into one of the worst forms of social tyranny the world has ever seen within its brief sway of less than two hundred years. ... So much the less digging for us to do in order to see what it was all like. But there are some places in that forgotten continent which I am more eager to visit than the site of New York or Chicago or Washington! You will hardly guess what they are nor why I am so keen to see what has happened there during the thousand years they have been out of the known world. Fortunately these places were not covered by the glaciers and human society in one form or another may have survived in them continuously all these centuries. If so, it will be well worth while to know what it is like. . . . Let us go over to the map room and have a look at them!" The circle that had formed around the table where old Felix sat followed him through the intervening courts to the quiet and remote corner of the great building where Felix had his own working quarters. ... It was in this unhurried, yet un- wasteful, manner that many of the most important affairs of the modern world were conducted, through exchange of ideas in informal meetings like this one, rather than in stuffy com- mittee rooms or across a desk in a dark ofiBce! (Significant, YOUTH 99 perhaps, it was that this ill-omened word never occurred in the working vocabulary these days!) Government was no longer conducted either in hidden bureaus where formerly the endless coils of futile red tape were wound and unwound, nor in legislative halls filled with the raucous sounds of disputatious and insincere voices, but in the open, outdoors — as in the days of remote antiquity, in the "piazza" where everybody gathered to hear the news and exchange views, and make up their minds. In the new world all formahties, prohibitions, routines were avoided as much as possible, all votings and tricky legal forms. Custom was law, and custom was subtly being created and molded everywhere, in the private home, the labor unit, the university laboratory, wherever men and women worked, lived, thought, communi- cated. The statute books of such a community as this of Khartoum would have been considered in the past meager, primitive. Where in the so-called Christian world the effort had been to define in technical terms every proposal (often obscurely worded with the deliberate purpose to nullify the intention of the measure or confuse it), the modern idea was to instill beneath consciousness certain broad, fundamental conceptions of living, and then leave their applications to be worked out on the spot, not cramped within rules and legal terminology. To cheat, to steal, to deceive, to defraud as well as to kill or harm another must become difficult for the average human being merely to desire, not classified into an intricate category of crimes each with its peculiar and variable penalty. A properly born and nurtured human being would no more conceive of committing these antisocial acts than he would desire to forni- cate with his mother or his sister, or degrade himself by indulgence in evil drugs. The more firmly such tabus, inner inhibitions, were developed, the longer they operated with 100 SOMETIME rare cases of infringement, the less it had become necessary to safeguard society with prescriptions from the harmful acts of its individual members. The four useless professions, which had been the corner- stones of the social temple of old, had been relegated to the scrap heap of barbarism. First the military profession had become quite obsolete, now that no individual and no com- munity had any interest in taking property from others. Even the police was hardly more than an honorary service for old men and women, who liked to fuss importantly over the small details of social housekeeping. Instead of maintaining a large body of highly trained soldiers and their officer class as a breed- ing ground of violence, these members of society were obliged to pull their weight in useful functions, thus releasing an enor- mous creative force which had been kept of old for purely destructive purposes. Another great boon in the modern concept of life was that it had dispensed with lav^^ers along with law, which had become the veritable pest of former days, increasing human frictions and cross purposes, like disease-laden parasites. Legal experts, once feeding like maggots in the great gut of society, subtilizing and clouding human purposes, professionally bound to make wrong appear right and right wrong, had vanished. Literally their jobs had been taken away from them. All mature members of any society were supposed to know its guiding principles, which were so simple that any child under- stood them. They were, so to speak, the rules of the house, common decencies to be observed by all. All were equally interested in their observance and any neglect or contravention of them suffered immediately the discipline of social disappro- bation, the most potent agency of correction. The situation with regard to the two remaining learned professions, priests and doctors, was somewhat different. The YOUTH loi necessity for maintaining a class of superstition mongers had disappeared with the disappearance of crass credulity. While rehgious impulse in its essence of veneration for life and exalta- tion of all its ecstasies had enormously increased so that each individual had become so to speak a priest, the specific cult of superstition no longer required the maintenance of a large body of idle and useless and error-breeding clergy. It w^as recognized that rehgious cults with their priesthoods had been the cause of as much evil and discord in the world as had the military and the lawyers. Probably more ! as the poisons which they had injected into human souls had been more deadly or soporific. There had been little to choose among the large varieties of cults that had once ridden humanity: whatever had been the purposes of their founders, all had invariably been perverted by their followers into instruments of mental and spiritual slavery. In the free air of the new world they had simply faded away, and those who might truly have once been drawn to the priesthood from pure motives of devotion now undertook some form of educational service or of medicine. As for the latter profession, its present position was both more and less than it had ever been before. As the Service of Pubhc Hygiene medicine was all powerful, having the supreme control of human society in its many forms, more influential through its control of the human stock than any other social activity. But as a priestly caste of pill givers who drove a very profitable trade in the days of superstition it had ceased to exist; seeking private gain from the fears of ailing persons was abhorrent to the modern way of thinking. Whatever doctoring had to be done to keep society well and efficient was performed by a highly trained body of experts, as a division of the Pubhc Hygiene Control, and obligatory upon everybody. The medical profession, at least its more intelligent members, had realized before the end of the old regime that the profession had little 102 SOMETIME real knowledge of disease or of ways of controlling it; that most of what they taught and practiced was pure hokum, as bad as that of the priests, and that whatever they knew was good and effective should not be sold at a high price in hospitals and private clinics, but provided for everybody by the state freely. The dire principle of "private initiative" had fought this view of the function of medicine furiously as it fought every effort to free humanity from the bonds of profit. But now that selfish- ness and greed had been eliminated as the primary motives of human conduct it was possible to make important advances in medical knowledge and practice. Moreover, the conception of the relation of medicine to mankind had changed profoundly. Where formerly it had been the main effort of the profession to keep the breath of life somehow going in derelicts, to patch badly made and ailing human bodies, it was now the first task of the Service of Public Hygiene to see that efficient bodies were bred and taken care of, to eliminate causes of decay rather than to cure temporarily broken-down bodies. Thus medicine seemed to care less for the "sacredness of life" — and more ! Those occasional instances of defective bodily organisms that still occurred were mercifully and promptly sent to the Lethal Chambers, as well as the far more distressing instances of mental and moral inadequacy. On the other hand, the maintenance of a high degree of physical fitness was uni- versally considered a primary duty and illness, if not an actual disgrace, a serious personal disability from which one should either retrieve himself at once or take to the nearest Lethal Chamber. There was thus less sentimental softness about health and more eflEcient care of it, and the members of the Public Hygiene Board of Control had the highest prestige in the community. (One of their lesser duties was to suppress any YOUTH 103 tendency to indulgence in quackery like Christian Science or psychoanalysis, or in individual doctoring and self-pity.) One might describe the Public Hygiene Board of Control as the modern form of the Inquisition! The physical well-being of every individual as well as of society was thus brought under constant supervision to economic advantage: there was little loss of efiEciency and labor hours in such a world. But a larger gain was in the improvement in mental hygiene. Not only had defectives and paranoiacs been eradicated, but neurasthenia which had made appalling inroads on the civilization of the later Christian era had been largely eliminated. A sound mind in a healthy body being the fundamental requisite for a strong society, thanks to the efforts for public hygiene, the modern world did not labor any longer under the terrible handicap of disease. The gradual obsolescence of the four powerful professions of the old world, due to a large extent to a changed viewpoint about life rather than to any biological change in the human animal, human nature no longer being as it once was but rather as it always had the incentive to become, one would suppose that greater emphasis would be thrown upon the remaining profession, that of teaching. And in a sense that had happened to an extraordinary degree, which accounts for the importance of the Greek Felix and his colleagues, who were more like university professors of former days than anything else. But education itself had been transformed with the grow- ing recognition of its supreme importance. It was no longer a method of training the young how to make their living, for that was no longer necessary. It was rather the conscious organ- ized effort of those specially equipped to demonstrate the worth of life and its best values. As has been said elsewhere, education did not cease in the 104 SOMETIME early twenties even for the privileged: it progressed continu- ously throughout the span of life. The individual received this education wherever he might be, whatever vocation he might finally undertake, from the first day when he was enrolled in a labor band. Of the large numbers released for normal creative living by the suppression of the miUtary, the priests, the lawyers and the doctors (of the old school) the majority naturally went into some form of educational work. This, however, was not classroom teaching or lecturing or even research in university laboratories as was once the usual form of "education," for the practical was no longer divided by an artificial barrier from the theoretical. The efficiency of modern society was main- tained and developed by a vast system of laboratories, which thus took the place not merely of government bureaus but of educational organizations as well. Of all the classes in the old form of society, of all occupa- tions, the teachers and university research men would have been most at home in the new, with one potent difference. The pedagogic and dictatorial habit of thought was alien to the temper of the new world. The pedant there would be con- sidered a bore and be shunned. The self-importance of the old type of "scholar" would have been ridiculed as well as his tendency to petty bickering and conservatism. Towards the end of the older forms of society the universities, which should have been the homes of new aspirations and championed changes in the decaying social order, were rather instrumental- ities of reaction, subsidized by the rich and powerful primarily to ensure the continuance of that individualized and privileged state of society from which their benefactors profited. Thus they lost their opportunity for influence and lost the respect of the society they were supposed to lead! Yet the best university spirits of the old order would have felt at home in Felix's maproom peering over a representation YOUTH 105 in relief of the ethnographical conditions of Central America at the beginning of the twentieth century a.d. . . . "There!" exclaimed Felix placing his thin forefinger over a narrow portion of the map, "was the really vital cultural center of the old New World!" and the old man smiled, somewhat professorially, at the mystified expression on the faces of his hearers. Chapter Four HERE AND THERE IN THE NEW WORLD FROM the maproom they adjourned to one of the Ubraries to consult an old book on the pre-Spanish civilization of Mexico. Here and in the adjoining rooms were preserved in special cabinets the comparatively few vol- umes that had survived in legible form from the old world. Most of the volumes in the cabinets were transcripts upon very fine vellum, practically indestructible, of such books as had survived the glacial period, having been found in out-of-the- way corners of the warmer parts of the earth or having been discovered buried in vaults under some ruin of the previous era. Every ancient book as soon as discovered was submitted to this process of transcription on vellum and yet the total number scarcely reached the total of books published in a single year of the last decades of the Christian era! Fortunately most of the cherished works of antiquity had survived because of their wide distribution, along with much that the modern mind considered merely curious or rubbish. It was thought that society was fortunate, on the whole, in not having more old books. "One must winnow occasionally the mental efforts of the race," Felix observed lightly. "Otherwise humanity would become buried in its exudations as I suspect was becoming the case towards the end of the old world. Quantity never impUes quality, and the terrifying quantity of publications during the 1 06 HERE AND THERE IN THE NEW WORLD 107 last hundred years of the old system contained less and less of distinction. We have done well to relegate all that sort of expression to ephemeral pictures and sound records, have not embalmed it between covers to clutter our dwelhngs — and our minds." As the old man spoke he was gently turning the pages of an old volume, yellowed by time and almost illegible, when sud- denly there fell from between two pages an oblong bit of yellow paper. One of the young men recovered it as it drifted to the floor and holding it up for all to see exclaimed, — "What's this do you suppose.?" Felix sent for a powerful magnifying glass and scrutinized the faded bit of paper closely. Then holding it from him so that all might see it, his mouth relaxed into a smile, he asked, — "Can any of you guess what that once was? ... It must have traveled a good bit to have got here!" Peering once more through the magnifying glass he read aloud, — "The National Bank of New Hampshire . . . 1932 . . . Portsmouth, N. H. . . . Ten Dollars!" A young voice interrupted, — "It must have been money — there are strips of paper like that in the museum!" "Just so! . . . That bit of faded rag once was what was known the world over as Money— the most potent single term in the old world. It was what 'made the world go round' as they used to say. ... A promise to pay the owner of the rag ten gold dollars, for gold was the most desired form of money. There were always other forms of money besides gold and paper, silver, nickel, copper, almost everything was used as money at one time or another, even whiskey, — the stuff they drank to make themselves happy. Before they had money they used to exchange what they produced for what they wanted, and it was considered a sign of high civilization for a people to have money hke this instead of doing their business by io8 SOMETIME barter. With this mankind could procure almost everything desired except peace or happiness! . . . "Unfortunately 'money' didn't stay stable. It had no value in itself, not even the gold pieces one could demand in ex- change for this bit of rag. You could never tell for long what you might be able to buy with your money. Money fluctuated like every other value in society with both time and place, and these fluctuations were the cause of much uncertainty and misery in the old world. Clever as many of those people were in their way of doing business they never seemed able to stabilize their medium of exchange, with the result that some were always profiting at the expense of others less fortunate or less farsighted. Money seemed to run into a few large pools and lie stagnant there while the great majority suffered for lack of enough money to buy what those who had too much money had to offer. Consequently those with money not being able to use it suffered also and nobody knew how to break this vicious circle so that money could circulate freely and all could use it. A strange people!" "Why don't we have money?" another young voice asked wonderingly. The older assistants smiled at this elementary question. "What would you do with it ? It wasn't pretty and it wasn't good to eat! We got rid of money because everybody having the right to what they needed there was no longer use for a medium of exchange as they called it. . . . But it is the money idea rather than the thing itself which interests me. Just con- sider the real meaning of the money habit: if you wanted any- thing from a pencil to a good meal or a place to sleep you must have some of the money stuff, carry it around with you and give it out for what you wanted. You lived and breathed literally on money. The monstrosity of such a slavery never occurred to the ancients: they were concerned only with how HERE AND THERE IN THE NEW WORLD 109 much they could get for it or how Uttle they need give of it for what they wanted. They thought almost solely in terms of money. One even gave money to women for the pleasure of their embraces, perhaps the most ridiculous use to which money was ever put! . . . "If there had been justice in these money transactions, if everybody could have counted on receiving or paying exactly the same or equivalent values for identical articles and services and satisfactions money might have worked no more badly than many of their crude arrangements. But there never was any justice or equality either in what money would buy or in its distribution. Some, comparatively few individuals, were so advantageously placed that they had more money than other human beings quite as valuable in themselves. Those with money could buy whatever they wanted, all the desirable things of life including women's caresses, while their neighbors who might contribute just as much effort to society went cold and hungry and miserable. "In order to reconcile humanity to such an obvious absurdity the idea was carefully spread about and came to have a religious sanction that money was not merely an exact standard of absolute values, which of course it never was as these values were fluctuating all the time like the weather, but also a sound standard of human worth as well: if you had twice or ten times as many of these rag pieces, properly stamped, as your neighbor, you were thought to be twice or ten times as valuable a person to the community as your neighbor. ... It went to incredible lengths of absurdity, this transvaluation of all human values into money terms. In America they even spoke of 'hun- dred thousand dollar men' and 'million dollar executives,' meaning persons whose services or functions commanded such huge sums aimually, while other men doing precisely the same or similar or even more exacting tasks — and no less efficiently HO SOMETIME — ^received for their efForts but a small fraction of such money rewards. "Naturally this practice of rating men by the amount of money they could induce others to pay them for their services aroused not merely much envy and discontent, but also in the more disinterested and enlightened fragment of society much ridicule. So they invented another pretty little myth to pacify those disgruntled members of society whose services, however indispensable, were inadequately paid: they said that these latter were paid mostly in another sort of coin, by the 'esteem' that their efforts evoked, and so forth. Most of their preachers and teachers and inventors and many of their illustrious men of science had to content themselves with this substitute for money, — ^prestige and 'esteem.' . . . "All that made the absurdity of the money standard of values only the more glaring. Yet they could not think them- selves away from this crazy conception of money value for all human effort; they were floundering about in it worse than ever just before the final collapse of society. I believe that a main cause for the harmonious development of our modern life is that we have escaped all bondage to the money idea of value. Something a few of the more enlightened among the ancients used to dream about and talk about, but never even attempted!" The old man's audience Hstened respectfully to his observa- tions about money, but without much interest as one hstens to an academic discussion of any subject that finds no immediate response in experience. A youthful voice again insisted casually, — "But why don't we have money .?— -it must have been of some use." "For what? Just how would you use it if you had tons of this stuff?" (The old man waved the faded rag wildly.) "What HERE AND THERE IN THE NEW WORLD iii could you get with it that you haven't abundantly already?" Felix noting that the questioner was a girl added mockingly, — "You can get all the clothes and anything else they have from the stores by merely asking for what you fancy. I can get a bone for Marco this noon and also my own nourishment by merely presenting myself at any one of the many food booths in the city, or I can have a ride to Timbuctoo on the Globe Express by merely proving to the proper person I have a real reason for wanting to go there . . . and so on ! The only use of money is where there are more people with more wants in their lives than can be satisfied by what society creates; where some have to go without. Money was a crude device for sepa- rating those who want and can't have from those who can have whatever they want. But we have arranged matters so that there are never more persons in the world than we can adequately provide for and among them it is easier to dis- tribute what we have without the interference of money, as in one great family. . . . "Of course," he added as an after-thought, "we don't spend our time trying to incite people to want many useless things which they can't have — as the great business men of the Amer- ican era boasted they did! It seems to us merely silly to stim- ulate appetites for foolishness that only a few can gratify." Fehx still clutching the faded ten dollar bank bill which had begun to crumble in the warmth of his hand exclaimed, — "Think of the many poor devils who have pawed this wretched bit of paper or failed to get it or one like it! What fears and heartaches and what mean prides its possession has caused! How many ghastly and contemptible crimes have been committed to get possession of it or its like. How many lives have been ruined either because of having too many of them — or not enough! . . . "Money was one troublesome device that the Ice Cap forever 112 SOMETIME put an end to. Our remote African ancestors had never used money widely, merely bits of shell and bead. Money was a European importation brought hither by our conquerors, the money habit. And during the era of readjustment, say, the first half of the modern epoch, men had too many realities on their hands to snarl themselves up with money systems as did the ancients. They had to create a sufl&cient and stable food supply, which was distributed according to need to all, not according to the ability to buy with money. During those first centuries of struggle against adverse conditions everything was done for the common good — as it had been among primitive societies of the old world — and the results of this common effort were shared in common, until the habit of considering the com- munity rather than its individual units became so ingrained in human nature, so deeply rooted I trust within all of us, that we can no longer even imagine what use we could have for purely private ownership and acquisitions such as the money habit cultivated. "For I attribute our present vigor and happiness, our freedom from the futile and horrible madness of war, as well as our rapid progress in the application of knowledge to life, as much to our having been for centuries released from the money habit with its degrading single standard of all human values, as to anything. Yes, as much as to our sensible recognition that too many inferior people allowed to be born are a burden rather than a benefit even to themselves. These two great differences in our modern world from all older civiUzations, a controlled birth rate and freedom from an exclusive money standard of valuation, have done more than anything else to put us ahead of the old hit-or-miss society. . . . "But I would not end on this material consideration, the obvious material advantages of our economy, of our solutions for those two age-old problems, population and money. The HERE AND THERE IN THE NEW WORLD 113 essential aspect of the whole business has been the change in human mentaUty due to change in habits in these two vital matters. For always the fundamental solution of every human problem lies in the mind, in the mental reaction produced, which the ancients were wise enough to perceive, without, however, endeavoring suflBciently to use their discovery. We think quite differently about almost every detail of our lives because we have eradicated from our consciousness money fears, envies, hatreds, cupidities — the money preoccupation, with all its degrading and nefarious associations. This had become so inextricably interwoven in the former systems of civihzation that one cannot read today a page from any of their books, except those on pure science, without realizing what a curse, an obsession money had become; how it vitiated every instinct, every thought that passed through human con- sciousness. "I recommend you, each one of you, to familiarize yourself not with their intricate accounting and financial systems, which would be tiresome and meaningless, but with the social distor- tions wrought in individual lives by this curse of money to which they were born. You will not be able to understand much of what you will find in the old New World, without such a realization. Get one of their popular fictions, almost any one of them, and examine it with this thought in mind. See how men and women behave under the prevailing obsession of money values, money standards, both rich and poor!" Old Felix, whose voice trembled with passionate intensity as if the accidental discovery of the yellowed banknote had aroused deep chains of conviction, paused once more and dreamily contemplating the bit of old rag in his hand mur- mured as to himself, — "Somebody once thought he was happier for having this bit of paper in his grasp! How little he knew himself or the real 114 SOMETIME values of life! If he had realized how much woe, how many crimes this little piece of money symbolized, he might have burned it in the nearest fire! . . , "But it is likely enough humanity would have never out- grown the delusion of money had it not been for the over- whelming catastrophe which necessitated a rebirth, a beginning once more under many handicaps of the long process of evolu- tion. The Ice Cap rendered all forms of what formerly were considered valuables totally valueless and compelled mankind with a pitiless insistence to consider realities instead of tyran- nous symbols such as this. Life was very stern on this earth, very simple, stark for hundreds of years, after the coming of the Ice Cap. Men learned their lesson well! . • . "What I have been saying about their great money fetish would have seemed to ancient men and women more blas- phemous than any insult to their gods. They would have immediately entombed me in one of their hells on earth, their prisons, or in their madhouses (where a majority of themselves would be interned had they lived among us!) for saying half what I have said to you today. In fact they did so treat the few enUghtened persons who had the temerity to hint at these truths, beginning with the One the Christians called their Savior! "All that far-off unhappy time has passed away with its freight of needless human misery, its universal restlessness, its sense of individual defeat and thwarted existence, its monstrous cruelties of man to man. All that has vanished. But let us never forget — " As the old man's voice grew deeper with the solemnity of his warning he let slip the crumbling piece of paper, which fluttered downward to the feet of the young girl. "We must never for one moment forget how thin is the knife blade of difference which separates you and me and the full existence HERE AND THERE IN THE NEW WORLD 115 we lead from the dreadful futility and anguish of that past. It is so narrow and yet so profound, this gulf, that of himself no single individual could cross it, without the consent of his fellows." The old man jabbed his bald head with his forefinger signifi- cantly. "The difference lies here! in just the way in which we sense life, feel it, think of it! That is all that divides us from the ancients. Our splendid accomplishments in knowledge, in the technique, the mastery of nature, of our environment, are little: they could have done as much as we have. They had almost solved many of the problems we have since solved and are still solving: had they not been thwarted and diverted by the incredible social muddle and wrongheadedness in which they lived and thought, they too would have without doubt captured those magnetic forces, which is our greatest mechani- cal triumph. But they were blinded, inhibited by their preju- dices about true values; if they had succeeded in harnessing magnetic forces to their machines they would have used this enormous power to enslave the majority as they did with steam, with electricity, and other natural forces. . . . " 'Human nature being what it is,' they could think of no other way to utihze what their best minds produced than to sell its benefits according to the money standard. 'Human nature being what it is,' they were forever droning apologeti- cally — and let it go at that! . . . With the same faculties that they had, with no better mental abilities than the best of them enjoyed, although a far higher common standard of efficiency, we have demonstrated the falsity of their dreary hypothesis that the human soul is forever locked within the prison of a limited capacity and morality. It is all in your mind, as they were wont to say in an irony of disbelief. In our minds, yours and mine and everybody's. We not only think differently with ii6 SOMETIME these minds of ours; but we are different because we think and feel differently, from ancient hmnanity, because we have other dominant values in our lives than the money value ! . . . "Thus you may understand how important it seems to us, especially to us elders who are most responsible for interpreting and guiding the will of the race, what each and all of us think about life. We are more concerned with mental hygiene than with physical hygiene! Our modern culture is almost entirely a mental culture, a culture of the human mind from the embryo to the grave, instilling therein a succession of irresist- ible images, closely related, coordinated, and responding to each other, evolving into that thing which the ancients so much feared, — the Mass Mind. We are proud that in a million differ- ent ways we are molding this Mass Mind as we are being molded by it. Without our strict control of the Mass Mind we should become like the ancients, warring, struggling groups, doing evil to ourselves and to others. Within a few hundred years — or less — ^we should collapse as a society under the stresses and strains caused by the free expression of incoherent impulses and thoughts. . . . Each individual in the modern world is a cell of that Mass Mind to which and through which every vital impulse of our common life is transmitted, moment by mo- ment, building on this earth Eternal Life, the greatest adven- ture that the human mind can conceive." One of the young men who worked in the New Food Prod- ucts Division of the Food Supply Control had invited Felix to take his midday meal at the Laboratory Restaurant attached to the Division and sample a new product, one of the crosses of fruit and vegetable with which his department had been ex- perimenting. The Coriolanus as it was dubbed had the outer appearance and pink flesh of a Persian melon, with the creamy consistency and flavor of a banana and some of the quaUty of HERE AND THERE IN THE NEW WORLD 117 the sweet potato. One Coriolanus afforded a hearty snack for four persons. The young man expatiated on its calories and vitamins and other nutritive elements and received the con- gratulations of the old Greek, who indulgently poked a spoon into the recesses of the new dish before him. "What we have accomplished since we began to cross vege- tables and fruits is just the beginning of what we can do for our food supply," the young expert exclaimed enthusiastically. "You will soon be combining your fruit-vegetable messes with rabbit and deer steaks, I suppose," the old man chaffed. "That's not as impossible as it sounds," the young expert rejoined earnestly. "Even the ancients knew how to get all the necessary food elements for a good diet without the use of meats as protein. What has been lacking is the proper taste to deceive the palate accustomed to pure protein." "Ah, that's what you are after, doing away with the use of meat altogether. I always suspect you scientific food mixers of being vegetarians in disguise. ... It won't do for me, young man! I shall stick to my bit of broth and pheasant wings on occasion. I don't believe you will ever be able to suggest what a grilled rhino tastes like. And if your new concoctions succeed, what will our mountainfolk say when you have destroyed the use for their flocks of goats, sheep, gazelles, and so on? You have to consider the meat producers. You can't take their livelihood and occupation away from them, just because you laboratory fellows think you have discovered satisfactory sub- stitutes." "That's the way the American farmers of the busted era used to talk," the young man retorted quickly. "They believed they had an inalienable right to poison the human race with whatever food products they could make the most money on, like the hog and wheat! What's the use of a scientifically bred society if we are not to improve constantly its food products.? ii8 SOMETIME We are merely seeking the largest possible variety of nutritious and palatable materials which can be easily produced and which we believe are best suited for modern conditions and the modern stomach, which thanks to lack of worry and other disturbing conditions and the almost complete abandonment of fermented liquors is quite a different article from the stomach of our ancestors. ... As a matter of fact only a few old people like yourself, if you will pardon me for saying so, still hanker after a meat diet. Almost everybody in this warm part of the globe prefers other, less difficult foods." "They didn't when this part of the globe was much warmer and less salubrious than we have made it," Felix grumbled. "Do you remember the large flocks the Arabs grazed, from which they got the principal article of their diet as well as their coverings and tent material.? . . . No, no, young man, you can't so easily dispense with the wisdom of the old world. Man has experimented with his diet since he somehow contrived to stand on his hind legs and by and large that diet has always included a large amount of animal food whenever he could obtain it and of wheat and grain stuffs as soon as he was clever enough to grow them. There may be a wisdom in this choice of diet by humanity over thousands upon thousands of years that you and your lab companions don't comprehend!" It being well known that Felix was a reactionary in the matter of diet the young man merely smiled, as he suggested slyly — "Then why don't we follow the same line of argument in regard to the propagation of the race .'' Ever since man went on his hind legs — and long before in all probability — he selected his sexual mate not for her eugenic qualities but for some hidden charm that attracted him to her— and her to him, regardless of the consequences. Why interfere by your labora- tory notions of suitable matings with the instinctive urge of HERE AND THERE IN THE NEW WORLD 119 nature to satisfy its sexual cravings? We certainly have dis- covered as much about food values as about the proper dis- tribution of genes and about favorable and unfavorable stocks!" The old man thus neatly caught on the horns of the dilemma laughed merrily and good-naturedly poked the young man in the ribs. "Don't mind my bellyaching— you w^on't anyhow! Go on with the making of your plant abortions and find some un- interesting nut or breadfruit that will contain every essential element of human nourishment — ^but don't expect me at my age to swallow the tasteless stuff." "We shan't. Don't worry! You'll have your meat broths and tough rhino steaks, fish fries, and all the other barbarous messes you hanker for as long as anybody is left among us who craves them. We have no idea of dropping animal foods from our dietary altogether at once. In some parts of the world they may never become wholly obsolete though in my opinion they are a most wasteful form of human food. . . . Don't they tell us that one of the contributing causes of the universal belligerency and quarrelsomeness of ancient civilizations was the general discomfort and poisoning of the human system with an exces- sively protein and starch diet.? Meats and soggy breads gave such a universal indigestion along with the cane sugar and alcoholic ferments they absorbed that human beings existed almost always in an inner state of discomfort and revolt, which they merely worked off by brutal behavior. Nothing I suppose has done more to civilize modern man than the attention he gives to what he eats, his effort to create efficient and har- monious dietaries, instead of leaving that important question to cranks or private greed, or inertia and appetite." "They used to eat whatever they could get," someone ob- served. 120 SOMETIME "Precisely! And it was nobody's business to see that one got the best materials for the occasion in proper proportions and quantities and properly prepared. ... As I said, we in our food experimental stations have done more for human evolution than what is called Eugenics and Selective Breeding with all their publicity!" At this outcropping of professional jealousy the company broke into laughter, to which Felix added, — "Can it be that you too are an Expansionist?" The young scientist blushed as he retorted, — "I am not anything but a food expert . . . though I must say that as we have succeeded in diminishing by over a third the energy required for the production of an adequate food supply, individuals if they like should take advantage of that economy to make more children if they want them! Isn't it true that the present cultivable areas of the earth's surface could support very much larger populations in the modern way than the same amount of land ever before did ?" FeUx nodded gravely. "And instead of having more we have less than a quarter of the maximum population once supported on the unscientific plan of the ancients ?" "Allowed to exist, let us say," Felix amended dryly, "with starvation, at least malnutrition endemic always, accentuated occasionally by wars and famines and plagues! Not a happy state of affairs I should say." "That would never happen, what with our many new eco- nomic products," the young man insisted. The small audience at the table consisting of the Chief Engineer (who was known to be a meat eater and also an Expansionist) and some of his assistants laughed at the relent- less logic of the young Food Expert. Felix grimaced, mum- bling,— HERE AND THERE IN THE NEW WORLD 121 "Now we are in for a long discourse on the value of the new food products and the purely vegetarian diet!" "Not at all," the Food Expert retorted good-naturedly. "We don't have to advertise them as they used to do soft drinks and their other vicious messes — ^they recommend themselves. . . . I see you have eaten your slice of Coriolanus, Felix!" "There is nothing else to eat." The young man clapped his hands and to the boy who responded said in a loud voice, — "Have a thick steak grilled for our guest. This hot day it will sit snugly in his stomach"; and then quietly resumed his discourse while the company smiled, — ^"I take literally that old gag, 'Man is what he eats,' especially when he eats unwisely. ... If that great American President in whose reign the collapse of the old order began had devoted his enormous energy to food control — ^in which by the way he first made his reputation — ^instead of trying vainly to bolster up the tottering capitalist system of production the total result might have been very different. . . . Your Americans had always been voracious meat eaters and were proud of the fact. Every stupid and evil inclination of their natures they attributed to their animal ancestors, forgetting that animals always live differently from semi-civilized man. If they had continued to Uve like animals they would not have felt evil effects from all the meat they ate. . . . Food is one of the cornerstones of society, and as long as anything animal is left in us we shall have to pay attention to its production and dis- tribution and selection. Isn't that true ?" Felix acquiesced and added in his accustomed manner, — "You haven't mentioned the most important aspect of the food supply, the social side." 1 "Social?" "Yes, social. Do you realize that mankind has always strug- gled and fought for an adequate food supply ? All through the 122 SOMETIME past ages there was rarely enough at any one time for every- body to have all the food desired and much of what was produced was badly distributed or wasted in luxury so that the few had more than was good for them and the many not enough. . . . "Older civilizations were closely dependent on the daily food supply. Even when sufficient command of the resources of nature assured an adequate supply, they did not know how to distribute it equably. During that last terrible epoch of un- reason the food warehouses were bursting with surpluses of all important food products while millions starved or existed in a state of physical anaemia from lack of proper nourishment. Large quantities of precious foods were destroyed willfully, to keep prices up, because there was an insufficient 'demand' for them, i. e., enough people supplied with the means to buy what had been produced. "Think of it! Millions of tons of sugar, wheat, corn were being destroyed and rich cornland plowed under while people starved for the lack of food. They could have fed every hungry mouth in the world, even with their wasteful notions of food, but they preferred to destroy it, let it rot, burn it, dump it in the sea, while men and women starved in silence. . . . You youngsters have only a vague idea of those terrible times. You hardly realize how different your world is from that one. You have never known hunger, want, anxiety for where your next meal would come from, nor even heard of anybody who ever wanted to eat and could not obtain food. Not one of you! "With the ancients as with wild animals, food was the one foremost preoccupation of consciousness, more insistent even than sex gratification. All that worry over food has disappeared from human consciousness. One no more thinks today about a possible unappeased hunger than one does about a lack of necessary air or of pure water or of earth on which to walk or HERE AND THERE IN THE NEW WORLD 123 of shelter in which to sleep or of clothing to warm his body. We recognize, as did a few in more advanced societies of the old order, that food is one of the essentials of any society — that is as long as we continue to get our energy renewed in this animal way, which we may not always. I hear rumors that transmission of nutritive elements through the sense of smell is being experimented with. Our friend here may yet be done out of his good job! . . . "For the present, however, we like the ancients must keep up our food supply. We have always known that an ample food supply evenly distributed was the basis of any well- ordered life; that without assurance of this men revert rapidly to the animal state. Even the ancients had got so far as to pro- vide in their larger communities some sort of almshouse where the starving could keep body and soul together, if the unfor- tunate ones were lucky enough to get into them. But we have gone far beyond that grudging recognition of men's right to eat. Our life today is based on a simple formula: food, shelter, clothing are as necessary to man as air or water or sleep; a sufficiency of all these essentials must be provided for everybody allowed to be born, not doled out as charity in driblets nor given in excessive quantities to a few, but free to all members of any society, in a reasonable sufficiency. Once that principle had been universally accepted the rest was sim- ple, perfectly possible of attainment. "As I have often demonstrated, even the ancients could have provided sufficient food for their bloated populations had they not been obsessed by their blind individualism. While we with our perfected techniques, our long experimentation with dif- ferent food products, our greatly improved knowledge of the chemical factories within us have discovered sources of nour- ishment in many unsuspected elements, in roots and the bark 124 SOMETIME of trees, in weeds and fibers — and in such monstrosities as my young friend's Gargantuan melon!" The old man smiled ruefully at the remains of the Corio- lanus on his plate. "There! I am talking like the Experts again, which may God forbid! Let our young friend tell you of the wonders of his food laboratory and his experimental nursery." "Don't forget the transportation and distribution services!" someone called out. "Nor the preparation and selection division!" "Nor the efiEcient service," chimed a small waitress setting down before the old man a huge side of beef with red juice trickling from its exposed surfaces. "Is this a smell nourishment experiment?" somebody in- quired ironically. "I wish some of you yoimgsters might be transported back into the old world. You might have sniffed in another way at such an opportunity to still your hunger pangs!" "Come, Felix, you forget our disciplinary fasts. Nobody in the modern world gets by these days without knowing what an empty stomach feels like." "Those fasts were instituted less to make you realize your habitual satisfactions than to train you in physical self-control and to let you experience some of the delights of pure con- templation unhindered by the digestive process. ... I wish there might be more fasts and longer ones." A prolonged whistle went up from the table. The monthly fast was one of the less popular innovations of recent years, among the youth of the community. Someone observed thoughtfully, — "That was such a simple idea, food control, making food as free as air or light, I wonder that clever people like the Amer- HERE AND THERE IN THE NEW WORLD 125 icans didn't think of it, especially when foods became a drug on the markets and they couldn't dispose of their surplus." "They tried to give food away, spasmodically. But the con- trol of food, you must remember, was a weapon of the powerful ones, one of the chief ways of fighting their wars. It was bound up like pretty much everything else in the nexus of private ownership and control, under what they were pleased to call 'individuahsm.' (As if it made human beings individual to starve them or allow certain ones to starve their fellows!) The error went back to what I call their animal conception of existence, which was their primary excuse for all forms of brutality and imbeciUty. Because the human being had his origins physiologically in the unorganized state of animals, after he had achieved the freedom of reason, nevertheless he used his animal origin as an excuse for his worst propensities. . . . Foods, the elements of existence, were property, like land, clothes, houses and every other necessity. Food and land were the two chief instrumentalities for the control of the many by the few; they were only surrendered to common use at the bitter end of their civilization when humanity began to flee from the frozen North towards the Equator, like the wild ani- mals to which they were reverting! . . . "Read the history of those terrible times, my friends, and see what it was like to live when you had to fight for your bit of food, for clothes to keep yourself warm and shelter from the cold. Then you will appreciate how different conditions are today, why we have the leisure to create Coriolanuses and many other good things, why we don't have to spend our energies in maintaining large armed bands to prevent other envious peoples from destroying us, — and why we are sitting here this lovely summer afternoon discussing among other things how delightful life is instead of wondering what to do in order to exist miserably a little while longer!" ii6 SOMETIME The group about the luncheon table had relaxed watching Marco, Felix's dog companion, sniff anxiously at the neglected side of beef. Perceiving his dog's controlled longings that mani- fested themselves in Uberal drooling the old man put the meat on the floor within Marco's reach. "Go to it, old man!" he encouraged the dog, who gulped hungrily the succulent meat. "See how he gorges himself! That was the way our ancestors acted when they had made a killing. They gulped the carcass in hunks and lay about for hours trying to digest the mess, as Marco will. No wonder they felt like fighting each other. I have learned from Marco more about our crude ancestors than from any of the old books. They weren't as decent as Marco, not as loyal and single- minded as a good dog. They were not as clean about their sexual appetites. Marco doesn't spend his days worrying about the next bitch he can get hold of as from their literature it would seem even the more civilized human beings did. . . . "To use Marco as a further text, the ancients did slowly achieve a kind of grudging recognition of sympathy, the duty of the community to its own members of all classes. But it was not very real, nor farsighted. They put the old, the poor, the helpless, the diseased and demented, and the criminal into special prison pens, segregated them out of sight. It would have been kinder, more economical and sensible at the same time, as long as they had no intention of restoring these pitiful derelicts to normal life, to kill them painlessly at once as we do the occasional cases of defective births. Man's love for man- kind, about which at times the ancients babbled so much, rarely rose above sentimentality into intelligent thought. . . . "To return to animalism as the determining factor in their lives, that great nation which we are about to visit in order to uncover their so