“But you found it did you no good. The better your machines, the harder
you worked. The more things you had the more you wanted. The pace of
life grew swifter and swifter. You cried out, but it would not stop.
You were all caught in the cogs of your own machine. None of you could
see the end.”
“That is quite true,” I said. “How do you know it all?”
“Oh,” answered the Man in Asbestos, “that part of my education was very
well operated—I see you do not know what I mean. Never mind, I can tell
you that later. Well, then, there came, probably almost two hundred
years after your time, the Era of the Great Conquest of Nature, the
final victory of Man and Machinery.”
“They did conquer it?” I asked quickly, with a thrill of the old hope
in my veins again.
“Conquered it,” he said, “beat it out! Fought it to a standstill!
Things came one by one, then faster and faster, in a hundred years it
was all done. In fact, just as soon as mankind turned its energy to
decreasing its needs instead of increasing its desires, the whole thing
was easy. Chemical Food came first. Heavens! the simplicity of it. And
in your time thousands of millions of people tilled and grubbed at the
soil from morning till night. I’ve seen specimens of them—farmers, they
called them. There’s one in the museum. After the invention of Chemical
Food we piled up enough in the emporiums in a year to last for
centuries. Agriculture went overboard. Eating and all that goes with
it, domestic labour, housework—all ended. Nowadays one takes a
concentrated pill every year or so, that’s all. The whole digestive
apparatus, as you knew it, was a clumsy thing that had been bloated up
like a set of bagpipes through the evolution of its use!”
I could not forbear to interrupt. “Have you and these people,” I said,
“no stomachs—no apparatus?”
“Of course we have,” he answered, “but we use it to some purpose. Mine
is largely filled with my education—but there! I am anticipating again.
Better let me go on as I was. Chemical Food came first: that cut off
almost one-third of the work, and then came Asbestos Clothes. That was
wonderful! In one year humanity made enough suits to last for ever and
ever. That, of course, could never have been if it hadn’t been
connected with the revolt of women and the fall of Fashion.”
“Have the Fashions gone,” I asked, “that insane, extravagant idea of—”
I was about to launch into one of my old-time harangues about the sheer
vanity of decorative dress, when my eye rested on the moving figures in
asbestos, and I stopped.
“All gone,” said the Man in Asbestos. “Then next to that we killed, or
practically killed, the changes of climate. I don’t think that in your
day you properly understood how much of your work was due to the shifts
of what you called the weather. It meant the need of all kinds of
special clothes and houses and shelters, a wilderness of work. How
dreadful it must have been in your day—wind and storms, great wet
masses—what did you call them?—clouds—flying through the air, the ocean
full of salt, was it not?—tossed and torn by the wind, snow thrown all
over everything, hail, rain—how awful!”
“Sometimes,” I said, “it was very beautiful. But how did you alter it?”
“Killed the weather!” answered the Man in Asbestos. “Simple as
anything—turned its forces loose one against the other, altered the
composition of the sea so that the top became all more or less
gelatinous. I really can’t explain it, as it is an operation that I
never took at school, but it made the sky grey, as you see it, and the
sea gum-coloured, the weather all the same. It cut out fuel and houses
and an infinity of work with them!”
He paused a moment. I began to realise something of the course of
evolution that had happened.
“So,” I said, “the conquest of nature meant that presently there was no
more work to do?”
“Exactly,” he said, “nothing left.”
“Food enough for all?”
“Too much,” he answered.
“Houses and clothes?”
“All you like,” said the Man in Asbestos, waving his hand. “There they
are. Go out and take them. Of course, they’re falling down— slowly,
very slowly. But they’ll last for centuries yet, nobody need bother.”
Then I realised, I think for the first time, just what work had meant
in the old life, and how much of the texture of life itself had been
bound up in the keen effort of it.
Presently my eyes looked upward: dangling at the top of a moss-grown
building I saw what seemed to be the remains of telephone wires.
“What became of all that,” I said, “the telegraph and the telephone and
all the system of communication?”
“Ah,” said the Man in Asbestos, “that was what a telephone meant, was
it? I knew that it had been suppressed centuries ago. Just what was it
for?”
“Why,” I said with enthusiasm, “by means of the telephone we could talk
to anybody, call up anybody, and talk at any distance.”
“And anybody could call you up at any time and talk?” said the Man in
Asbestos, with something like horror. “How awful! What a dreadful age
yours was, to be sure. No, the telephone and all the rest of it, all
the transportation and intercommunication was cut out and forbidden.
There was no sense in it. You see,” he added, “what you don’t realise
is that people after your day became gradually more and more
reasonable. Take the railroad, what good was that? It brought into
every town a lot of people from every other town. Who wanted them?
Nobody. When work stopped and commerce ended, and food was needless,
and the weather killed, it was foolish to move about. So it was all
terminated. Anyway,” he said, with a quick look of apprehension and a
change in his voice, “it was dangerous!”
“So!” I said. “Dangerous! You still have danger?”
“Why, yes,” he said, “there’s always the danger of getting broken.”
“What do you mean,” I asked.
“Why,” said the Man in Asbestos, “I suppose it’s what you would call
being dead. Of course, in one sense there’s been no death for centuries
past; we cut that out. Disease and death were simply a matter of germs.
We found them one by one. I think that even in your day you had found
one or two of the easier, the bigger ones?”