“Yes, you had found diphtheria and typhoid and, if I am right, there
were some outstanding, like scarlet fever and smallpox, that you called
ultra-microscopic, and which you were still hunting for, and others
that you didn’t even suspect. Well, we hunted them down one by one and
destroyed them. Strange that it never occurred to any of you that Old
Age was only a germ! It turned out to be quite a simple one, but it was
so distributed in its action that you never even thought of it.”
“And you mean to say,” I ejaculated in amazement, looking at the Man in
Asbestos, “that nowadays you live for ever?”
“I wish,” he said, “that you hadn’t that peculiar, excitable way of
talking; you speak as if everything _mattered_ so tremendously. Yes,”
he continued, “we live for ever, unless, of course, we get broken. That
happens sometimes. I mean that we may fall over a high place or bump on
something, and snap ourselves. You see, we’re just a little brittle
still—some remnant, I suppose, of the Old Age germ—and we have to be
careful. In fact,” he continued, “I don’t mind saying that accidents of
this sort were the most distressing feature of our civilisation till we
took steps to cut out all accidents. We forbid all street cars, street
traffic, aeroplanes, and so on. The risks of your time,” he said, with
a shiver of his asbestos clothes, “must have been awful.”
“They were,” I answered, with a new kind of pride in my generation that
I had never felt before, “but we thought it part of the duty of brave
people to—”
“Yes, yes,” said the Man in Asbestos impatiently, “please don’t get
excited. I know what you mean. It was quite irrational.”
We sat silent for a long time. I looked about me at the crumbling
buildings, the monotone, unchanging sky, and the dreary, empty street.
Here, then, was the fruit of the Conquest, here was the elimination of
work, the end of hunger and of cold, the cessation of the hard
struggle, the downfall of change and death—nay, the very millennium of
happiness. And yet, somehow, there seemed something wrong with it all.
I pondered, then I put two or three rapid questions, hardly waiting to
reflect upon the answers.
“Is there any war now?”
“Done with centuries ago. They took to settling international disputes
with a slot machine. After that all foreign dealings were given up. Why
have them? Everybody thinks foreigners awful.”
“Are there any newspapers now?”
“Newspapers! What on earth would we want them for? If we should need
them at any time there are thousands of old ones piled up. But what is
in them, anyway; only things that _happen_, wars and accidents and work
and death. When these went newspapers went too. Listen,” continued the
Man in Asbestos, “you seem to have been something of a social reformer,
and yet you don’t understand the new life at all. You don’t understand
how completely all our burdens have disappeared. Look at it this way.
How used your people to spend all the early part of their lives?”
“Why,” I said, “our first fifteen years or so were spent in getting
education.”
“Exactly,” he answered; “now notice how we improved on all that.
Education in our day is done by surgery. Strange that in your time
nobody realised that education was simply a surgical operation. You
hadn’t the sense to see that what you really did was to slowly remodel,
curve and convolute the inside of the brain by a long and painful
mental operation. Everything learned was reproduced in a physical
difference to the brain. You knew that, but you didn’t see the full
consequences. Then came the invention of surgical education—the simple
system of opening the side of the skull and engrafting into it a piece
of prepared brain. At first, of course, they had to use, I suppose, the
brains of dead people, and that was ghastly”—here the Man in Asbestos
shuddered like a leaf—“but very soon they found how to make moulds that
did just as well. After that it was a mere nothing; an operation of a
few minutes would suffice to let in poetry or foreign languages or
history or anything else that one cared to have. Here, for instance,”
he added, pushing back the hair at the side of his head and showing a
scar beneath it, “is the mark where I had my spherical trigonometry let
in. That was, I admit, rather painful, but other things, such as
English poetry or history, can be inserted absolutely without the least
suffering. When I think of your painful, barbarous methods of education
through the ear, I shudder at it. Oddly enough, we have found lately
that for a great many things there is no need to use the head. We lodge
them—things like philosophy and metaphysics, and so on—in what used to
be the digestive apparatus. They fill it admirably.”
He paused a moment. Then went on:
“Well, then, to continue, what used to occupy your time and effort
after your education?”
“Why,” I said, “one had, of course, to work, and then, to tell the
truth, a great part of one’s time and feeling was devoted toward the
other sex, towards falling in love and finding some woman to share
one’s life.”
“Ah,” said the Man in Asbestos, with real interest. “I’ve heard about
your arrangements with the women, but never quite understood them. Tell
me; you say you selected some woman?”
“Yes.”
“And she became what you called your wife?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And you worked for her?” asked the Man in Asbestos in astonishment.
“Yes.”
“And she did not work?”
“No,” I answered, “of course not.”
“And half of what you had was hers?”
“Yes.”
“And she had the right to live in your house and use your things?”
“Of course,” I answered.
“How dreadful!” said the Man in Asbestos. “I hadn’t realised the
horrors of your age till now.”
He sat shivering slightly, with the same timid look in his face as
before.
Then it suddenly struck me that of the figures on the street, all had
looked alike.
“Tell me,” I said, “are there no women now? Are they gone too?”
“Oh, no,” answered the Man in Asbestos, “they’re here just the same.
Some of those are women. Only, you see, everything has been changed
now. It all came as part of their great revolt, their desire to be like
the men. Had that begun in your time?”
“Only a little.” I answered; “they were beginning to ask for votes and
equality.”
“That’s it,” said my acquaintance, “I couldn’t think of the word. Your
women, I believe, were something awful, were they not? Covered with
feathers and skins and dazzling colours made of dead things all over
them? And they laughed, did they not, and had foolish teeth, and at any
moment they could inveigle you into one of those contracts! Ugh!”
He shuddered.
“Asbestos,” I said (I knew no other name to call him), as I turned on
him in wrath, “Asbestos, do you think that those jelly-bag Equalities
out on the street there, with their ash-barrel suits, can be compared
for one moment with our unredeemed, unreformed, heaven-created,
hobble-skirted women of the twentieth century?”