THE STORY OF THE CYLINDERS
“So it was you, Arnold,” said Sanson quietly. “Well ... what do you
think of Sir Spofforth’s theories now?”
All my hatred and fear of him had died in that blinding revelation.
Bewilderment so intense that it made all which had occurred since my
awakening dim, a sense of pathos and futility at once deprived me of my
fears and robbed him of his power; and we might have been the
fellow-workers of the old days again, discussing the problem of
consciousness.
He seated himself on the mud mound, and his voice was as casual as if we
had just returned to the laboratory after escorting Esther home. And
indeed I could with great difficulty only convince myself that I had not
fallen asleep and dreamed this nightmare.
“You see, it has all come to pass, Arnold,” said Sanson, twirling the
Ray rod idly between his fingers. “A world such as I foretold—a world
set free. Enlightenment where there was ignorance; the soul delusion
banished from the minds of all but the most foolish; the menace of the
defective still with us, but greatly shrunken; the logical State so
wonderfully conceived by Wells, with Science supreme, and almost a world
citizenship. It is a glorious free world, Arnold, to which humanity has
fallen heir, and the fight for it has been a stupendous one. And it is a
world of my creation! I have done what Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon
failed to do; I have brought humanity under one sway, out of the
darkness into light, out of ignorance to knowledge. I have set man, poor
plantigrade, on his feet firmly. He looks up to the skies, not in the
blind and foolish hope of bodiless immortality, but knowing himself the
free heir of the ages. Wasn’t it worth the battle, Arnold?”
My sense of pity deepened. Surely there can be no worse fate for any man
than to accomplish his desires! I thought of all the unknown idealists
who had given their lives to the accomplishment of great projects and
failed, achieving nothing—inventors, dreamers, a gray, fantasmal legion
whose lost hopes ranged back from age to age; and I saw how their works
were blessed and their failures glorified in contrast.
“Yes, I thought that it must be you as soon as I examined the sheets
from the Strangers’ Bureau,” continued Sanson, in his matter-of-fact
manner. But it seemed so incredible that the cylinder had erred that I
allowed my pressing duties to let me forget my impulse to take immediate
action. Unfortunately, while we were fellow-workers I did not take your
finger prints, but I had, of course, observed your characteristic
indexes, and also, if you remember, you were kind enough to my fad to
permit me to take your cranial measurements. I did not think that there
could exist two heads like yours, combined with those indexes, within a
single century. For your occipital region is excellent, approximating my
norm, while your frontal area is that of a moron. In short, you are a
typical Grade 2 defective, Arnold—essentially so; and I have no doubt
that, thanks to your five centimeters of asymmetrical frontal
development, you have emerged into this universe of reality still
clinging fondly and affectionately to your dualistic soul theory.
“But never mind!” he continued, smiling rather grimly. “I have no
intention of handing you over to Lembken’s ridiculous priests to be
tried for heresy. There will be no more priests after a little while.
The public mind is now ripe enough for the abolition of this stupid
compromise of the transition period from God to Matter. One more animist
will do little harm in a world in which they are still far from
uncommon. And then, I am not a man of cruel impulses, Arnold, and I do
not want to penalize you for having come into a world in which you are
an anachronism. So you have spent three weeks in London?” he ended,
scrutinizing me sharply.
“Yes.”
“And came back by night to see your birthplace, I suppose,” he said
maliciously. “I don’t know how you escaped the battleplanes. Unless they
are growing slack.... I found one scoutplane without its searchlight
working, and shall send its commander to the leather vats if I discover
him ... well, Arnold,” he resumed, “I could not believe that you had
come out of your cylinder before your time. You came within an ace of
disrupting my work, my world, if you only knew it—you with your missing
five centimeters! I put implicit faith in Jurgensen’s mechanism, and, as
it proves, I was to blame. I came here tonight to see if you could
really be gone.”
“You knew that I was here?”
“Why not, Arnold, since I put you here?” he returned, looking at me in a
quizzical manner. “I have paid you periodical visits during the last
five and thirty years. You looked charming in your sleep, Arnold! The
fact is, it was a difficult situation. There was no way of destroying
you, even if I had been so minded. I might have buried you ten feet
underground, or thrown you into the sea, I suppose, but the men who
moved you would have betrayed me unless I murdered them—in short, it was
a problem how to dispose of you without violating my naturally humane
impulses. So I did the best thing—covered the cylinder with mud and let
you lie here.
“That Jurgensen timepiece was splendidly contrived, Arnold,” he
continued. “Too splendidly, in fact, for in the haste of sealing you I
left the pointer six months ahead of time, as well as with Esther. It
has perhaps occurred to you that you went to sleep in June and awoke in
December?”
It had not occurred to me, but I made no answer to his sneering
question.
“In fact, Jurgensen gave me a six months’ leeway on his hundred-years
clock, and the complication of figures prevented me from discovering it.
I moved the pointer to the end of the dial, assuming that the last point
was a hundred, and not a hundred and a half. And then, Arnold, there was
another most regrettable mistake. You remember that you were sealed up
quickly, and rather impulsively, so to say? I found that, in hurriedly
capping you down, I forgot entirely to add twenty-four days upon the
smaller dial for the leap-years; and so you returned that much ahead of
Esther. It was a very bungled arrangement excusable in you, but not in
me.”
“Lazaroff!” I began, and then corrected myself with an apology as I saw
his brows contract. “Sanson—”
“Thank you,” he replied ironically.
“You will at least answer two or three questions, will you not?” I
pleaded. “How did you induce Esther to enter the second cylinder? Why
did you trick me? And how have you contrived to outlive the century
without appearing more than half your age? I think my questions
pardonable.”
“I shall answer them all,” said Sanson. “I may tell you that it was
never my plan to send our monkeys ahead of us into this world. I meant
to go, Arnold. But unexpectedly there came into my life something
against which I had made no provision. In other words, absurd as it
sounds, I fell in love. Then I planned to take Esther with me. But this
plan, too, was changed, for, to be quite frank, I gathered that she
preferred you to me. I then conceived the entertaining idea of taking
you both with me, so that our rivalry might be renewed in a world where
your advantages of personality would be counterbalanced by my power.
Arnold, I never for an instant doubted that I should stand where I stand
today. So, having persuaded you to enter the cylinder—and how I laughed
at your imbecile complaisance—I invited Esther to follow you. There was
no difficulty. On the contrary, she could hardly be convinced that I was
in earnest. However, I speedily convinced her by the simple process of
putting on the cap. Then, since the cylinders can be manipulated from
within, I myself entered the third.”
“You, Sanson!” I gasped. “You, too, have slept a hundred years?”
His look became envenomed, and the quick gust of passion that came upon
him was, to my mind, evidence of a mentality unbalanced by unrestrained
authority.
“Arnold,” he cried, “would you believe that an end so carefully planned,
so mastered in each detail, could be thwarted by an instant’s lack of
balance? You remember that, of the three cylinders, one was already set
a century ahead? That, save for the six months’ leeway that existed on
all the dials, and was, therefore, immaterial—that one, calculated to
the utmost nicety, leap-years and all, was the one I had selected for
myself already. That was the one Esther entered. The dial upon the
second cylinder I set in your presence, but omitted the four and twenty
days. That was your cylinder. And the third—mine—do you remember?—was
set to sixty-five.
“I removed this cylinder to a second vault of which you do not know. I
awoke in 1980. Arnold, I entered it and forgot the dial! When I
recovered strength—and I had supplied some food products to last me
during that brief period of recovery—I hurried to this vault. I found
only your cylinder, behind the fallen bricks. When I saw that you still
slept I thought your mechanism had gone wrong. Then, going back to
examine my cylinder, I realized the truth. I, who had loved Esther with
all my power, and vowed with all my will to win her, I, a young man of
twenty-five, must wait for five and thirty years before she awakened.
When my time came to claim her I would be old. O, Esther, what I have
endured during these years!”
The baffled love of half a life-span overcame him. I watched him, almost
as shaken. The tyrant of half the world, greater than any man had been
since the days when the Caesars reigned, he had bound himself to a more
awful law than any he could contrive. It wrung my heart even then, the
man’s grim hopes and long enduring love, checked by so slight a chance.
“I found Esther was gone,” continued Sanson presently, rising and
beginning to pace the vault. “I might have re-entered my cylinder, but I
did not know whether she survived in hers. I knew my ambitions claimed
me, and my duty to save humanity and raise it up from the ape. Even she
had to yield to that sacred and pitiful impulse. I learned soon that the
cylinder which contained her had been discovered and adopted as a symbol
of freedom. I found the world aflame and flung myself into the heart of
the revolution. By will I made myself the master of men. In six months
my dominance was unquestioned. I could have become supreme, but I chose
to work through others, that I might have the leisure to devote myself
to my plans for the regeneration of man. I have succeeded; I have made
the world better, Arnold, and I have made it free. But now, when at last
the reward of my long toil approaches, when at last I can show Esther
what I have achieved for her, and lay the world at her feet, I am an old
man, and the prize has turned to ashes.”
His grief conquered him again, and he paced the vault like a madman,
weeping with all the abandonment of one who is above the need of
conventional repressions. I remembered the antics of the crowd that
followed me to the court. Sanson’s grief was as unrestrained as their
malice. But I was brought back from pity by the realization of this new
and dreadful complication. Sanson loved Esther still. And he had worked
for her. I recalled her immature feminist views. He had believed her
youthful impatience of authority rested upon as firm a conviction as his
beliefs! He thought he had freed humanity. And all the uncountable
wrongs of earth had been heaped up by him as a love-offering to lay at
Esther’s feet.
I flung my prudence away. I clasped him by the hands.
“Sanson,” I pleaded, “don’t you see, don’t you understand what the world
is today? Each age has its own cruelties and wrongs; but, if poverty has
been abolished, have you not set a heavier yoke upon men’s necks? Their
children torn from them, the death-house for the old, the vivisection
table—”
“That is all true, Arnold,” he answered, “and sometimes, even now, that
old, inherited weakness that men termed conscience stirs in me. That
fatal atavistic folly!—for what is death, after all? A painless end, a
placid journey into nothingness, a resolution of the material atoms into
new forms, which shall, in turn, create that consciousness men used to
term a soul. Their children? Bah! Arnold, through suffering we win
upward. In the world-nation that is to come, the narrow, selfish
instinct called parental love—a trick of Nature to ensure the rearing of
the race—will not exist. It will have served its purpose. All I have
done is nothing in comparison with the great secret now almost within my
grasp. That is the meaning of the vivisection table—the research work
that will enable me to offer man immortality!”
I recoiled in horror at the sight of the fearful fanaticism upon his
face.
“Yes, it is that, Arnold, which I am almost ready to bestow upon the
world!” he cried triumphantly. “The old problem of consciousness and
tissue life on which we worked so long has practically been solved by
means at my disposal in a civilized world. Then we shall live indeed.
There will be no requirement that knowledge should progress painfully
through the inheritance of our fathers’ labors. We ourselves shall climb
the ladder of omniscience. The fit shall live forever, and we shall weed
out the moron and defective without scruple, preserving a race of mortal
slaves to labor for us in the factories and in the fields, holding them
subdued by the threatened loss of that life which we shall control and
permit to them so long as they are obedient. That is the noble climax of
man’s aspirations. Immortal life, in these bodies of ours, and Esther
mine, not for a span, but for eternity!”
I believed him—I could not help but believe. Can anything be impossible,
so long as man is gifted with free will for good and evil? Must he not
have the ladder to scale Olympus, and thereby learn of heights beyond? I
flung myself upon my knees before Sanson, like some poor father pleading
for his son’s life, and implored him to draw back. As he stood watching
me I babbled about the terror in the world, the boon of death, the
long-linked chain of humanity, bound all together as a spiritual unit,
which he would sever. I reminded him of the old days under Sir
Spofforth, of the old, free world we had lost. How had he bettered it? I
think I moved him, too, though, when I ended, he was regarding me with a
cold smile of negation.
“You want me to turn back, Arnold,” he said. “Once there was a time when
I hesitated. But ... can even that God of yours turn back? Come with me,
Arnold, and for the sake of the old friendship to which you have
appealed I will give you power. Defective as you are, you shall live
your life to the full capacity of your talent. You shall not suffer
because you came so unkindly into this world of ours. If your mind turns
toward pleasures such as that foul defective Lembken enjoys, they shall
be yours. If not, then you shall work with me as you used to do. When I
and Esther rule the world together, immortal as the fabled gods, you
shall sit at our feet and be our confidant.”
That I hoped still to win Esther had never entered the man’s mind. The
sublimity of his egotism was the measure of his blindness. Just as he
had entered the cellar, so self-absorbed that he had failed to see the
benches and the crucifix, nor dreamed that here, where his evil dreams
began, their end was planned, so, now, he did not see. The devilish will
that had carried him thus far would bring him to destruction.
At my hands, if I played the part shrewdly. But I lost all self-command.
“Though you have all the world at your feet, Sanson,” I cried, “you can
never hold me to obedience, nor Esther either. I love her, and we shall
both die before we yield!”
For an instant I saw his face before me, twisted with all the passions
of his thwarted will; then I saw the blinding white light leap from his
Ray rod as he fired at me.