So the argument had waged since the telling of Tom Driver's story.
Gregg's chief difficulty was to get Allingham to see that there really
might be something in this theory of a world in which merely trivial
things had become permanent, whilst the cosmos itself, the hitherto
unchanging outer environment of man's existence, might have opened up
in many new directions. Man might have tired of waiting for a so long
heralded eternity, and made one out of his own material tools. The
Clockwork man, now crystallised in Gregg's mind as an unforgetable
figure, seemed to him to stand for a sort of rigidity of personal being
as opposed to the fickleness of mere flesh and blood; but the world
in which he lived probably had widely different laws, if indeed it had
humanly comprehensible laws at all.
The clock, perhaps, was the index of a new and enlarged order of
things. Man had altered the very shape of the universe in order to be
able to pursue his aims without frustration. That was an old dream of
Gregg's. Time and Space were the obstacles to man's aspirations, and
therefore he had invented this cunning device, which would adjust his
faculties to some mightier rhythm of universal forces. It was a logical
step forward in the path of material progress.
That was Gregg's dimly conceived theory about the mystery, although,
of course, he read into the interpretation a good deal of his own
speculations. His imagination seized upon the clock as the possible
symbol of a new counterpoint in human affairs. In his mind he saw man
growing through the ages, until at last, by the aid of this mechanism,
he was able to roll back the skies and reveal the vast other worlds
that lay beyond, the unthinkable mysteries that lurked between the
stars, all that had been sealed up in the limited brain of man since
creation. From that extreme postulate it would be necessary to work
backward, until some reasonable hypothesis could be found to explain
the working of the clock mechanism. That difficulty, even, might be
overcome if only an opportunity occurred to examine this strange being
from the future, or if he could be prevailed upon to explain matters
himself.
As the car sped swiftly along, Gregg sat back with folded arms and
gazed upwards at the now crystalline skies, wondering, as he had never
wondered before, about that incomprehensible immensity which for
centuries of successive generations man had silently respected. No
authoritative voice had ever claimed to penetrate that supreme mystery.
Priests had evoked the gods from that starry depth, poets had sung of
the swinging hemispheres, scientists had traced comets and knew the
quality of each solar earth; but still that vast arch spanned all the
movements of crawling mankind, and closed him in like a basin placed
over a colony of ants.
True, it was an illusion, and man had always known that. For
generations he had known that the universe contained more than his
limited faculties could perceive. And beauty. There had always been
the consoling fact of beauty, lulling the race of man to content,
while every now and again a great mind arose and made one more effort
to sweep aside the bejewelled splendour that hung between man and his
final destiny--to know.
And yet, a slight alteration in man's perceptive organs and that wide
blue shell might shatter and disclose a thousand new forms, like
fantastic cities shaped in the clouds at sunset. Physiologists claimed
that the addition of a single lobe to the human brain might mean that
man would know the future as well as the past. What if that miracle had
been performed? By such means man might have come to know not only the
future, but other dimensions as yet unnamed or merely sketched out by
the mathematician in brief, arbitrary terms.
Until that time came, man's deepest speculations about ultimate reality
brought him no nearer to the truth than the child worrying himself to
sleep over the problem of what happened before God made the universe.
Man remained, in that sense, as innocent as a child, from birth to
death. Until the actual structure of the cells in his brain suffered a
change man could not actually know.
Einstein could say that we were probably wrong in our basic
conceptions. But could he say how we were to get right? The Clockwork
man might be the beginning.
And then, when that change had been wrought, that physical
reconstruction, what else might follow in its train? The Truth at
last, an end to all suffering and pain, a solution of the problems
of civilisation, such as overpopulation and land distribution, the
beginning of human sovereignty in the universe.
But Gregg had the sense to admit to himself that his generalisation was
no more than a faint aurora hovering around the rumoured dawn of the
future. It was necessary, in the first place, to posit an imperfect
thinking apparatus. After all, the Clockwork man was still a mystery
to be solved, and even if he failed to justify a single theory born of
merely human conjecture, there still remained the exhilarating task of
finding out what actually he was and how he had come to earth.