Draken's embryonic face puckered at me like an impish child's.
He explained: "Jokan is an atavist as I said. Women have always been
noted for their bodies rather than their brains, although potentially
their brain capacity has always been equal to the male's. And that
cultural error has never been changed. Instead, women have grown more
beautiful and symmetrical with the centuries, from the standpoint of
decadent and ancient aesthetic values. The men, on the other hand,
have always been considered as thinkers rather than as creations of
beauty. They have developed brain potential alone, while their physical
characteristics have atrophied.
"Except for atavists like Jokan, the overly curious longing for the
male body, as you represent it, has been conditioned out of the
reaction patterns by the psycho-medics by centuries of selection.
Jokan, as you have seen, is different. She demanded that I go back
to your time, or even further back and return with a man capable of
matching her body in physical attraction. You enraged her for a
moment, but she has recovered from that momentary emotional unbalance."
* * * * *
I objected at this point. "But you said I was to be just a laboratory
specimen for dissection."
"This whole transaction was elaborate and demanded official sanction
from the Council. So, on the record, your space-time teleportation is
only for biological purposes. You understand."
I nodded. It was not an exceptional situation, basically. It seemed
that a few million years of evolution can't destroy the fundamental
behavior patterns entirely. "A good man's still hard to find?"
The little scientist stared in blank affirmation. Then he said: "I
could have chosen any number of men who could have satisfied Jokan's
demands, perhaps even more thoroughly than you. Don't you wonder
why I singled you out? With your background in your world, and your
ideological concepts, you were the only one for me to chose--for my own
purposes."
"Which are--" I prompted.
"Neither of the preceding purposes are the basic ones for my asking you
to return here with me. The real reason is that you must destroy Mohln."
I stared. I turned everything over in my mind, then tried to say
calmly: "Why? This is civilization and the apex of human progress for
which I face death daily in my own time. Destroy it!"
I had begun to regard this little withered man as a first class
fanatic, born of highly complicated and advanced psychological
conflicts.
He said: "When the Earth was enveloped in its final ice sheet, living
as we demanded it ceased to be feasible. The pick of human mentality
and physiognomy migrated here to Mohln. Here we began our great--what
we thought great--new and scientific social order. Yes, it's reached
a zenith all right. A zenith of decay and stagnation. Except for a
few scientists, Mohln is populated by mindless automatons. Beautiful,
mindless women, and great brained, spineless men. They all exist in a
futile vacuum."
I was watching him narrowly for signs of madness. He looked mad enough,
but his squeezed up face was unreadable. I said feebly: "From what
little experience I've had here, you seem to have reached a pretty
ultimate state of civilization."
"That is the great tragedy. There is no ultimate state. That is the
great delusion which you must shatter. Everyone, societies, worlds, all
seek an ultimate state. Change is the law, and there is no ultimate
law. This world of Mohln thinks it has achieved an ultimate perfection.
It has, because of the delusion, only succeeded in stagnation. This
social structure is neither alive nor dead, Ivan Allinger. It is
standing still. The ultimate futility is to be static."
"Then you refute yourself," I said, feeling for a sophistic insert.
"You have reached an ultimate something."
"Only movement is the ultimate goal. And change is success.
Advancement--progress is limitless. This culture of Mohln has reached
an ultimate lostness. Only one action can shake it back onto the
pattern of change. The entire World-City of Mohln must be destroyed,
reduced to chaos. Out of this chaos, by trial and error, the people
of Mohln must be given the germ of incentive again, and forced by
necessity to fight their way back onto new roads of endeavor."
I thought hard. I felt familiar struggles in my heart. I understood
this. My own life was dedicated, back in my own space and time, to this
same effort and goal--to stimulate progress, and change; to destroy all
reactionary elements that might lead to permanence.
He followed my introspection with words. "You fought in the great wars
of your time against the reactionary forces that would have led your
society into staticism and decay. You are devoting the present to the
furthering of the ideals of progress. Do you want to see all your work,
and all the work of all your kind, of your own present, past and future
end in--this?"
He spread his withered arms about him, encompassing the whole of the
World-City of Mohln.
"No," I heard myself muttering. "No. I wouldn't want that. I would
prevent it, if I could. But I demand more than your words to convince
me that this magnificence of organization I see about me is the
hopeless futility you are telling me it is."
"I will take you out into the city and show you," he said. "But it is
strictly against the rules of the Council. And the few intellectuals,
the scientists and research technicians don't care anymore about the
disintegration of the order about them. In their own little worlds they
find something to work on, a stimulus, and they ignore everything else.
Like Jokan."
* * * * *
Draken led me out onto a balcony, and I saw--well, a word that might
inspire somewhat explanatory suggestive visions of what I saw, in your
own mind, could be the symbol, Utopia. It was an endlessly stretching
composite of all social dreams.
The mauve lighting that softened the city like a beautiful mist. The
mighty, gleaming plastic shells of buildings. Power hung at levels
reaching high toward a translucent dome that covered the city. Tiers on
tiers of splendidly designed walkways, tubeways and highways networked
the spaces between structures. And the air sang with music, more
magnificent than all the symphonies of my own time.
I forgot the dizzying height, and almost stepped out into the exalting
splendor of it. There seemed no danger, as though it were all an
endless soft cloud of enchantment into which I could sink, then float
buoyed up by dreams and music and shifting light....
But the little tugging fingers of Draken dragged me back.
"It is all false," he whispered. "It is all delusion. Beneath all
this grandeur the lost puppets dance and sleep, but never live. These
words, which are the only words that make a social system worthy
of continuation--curiosity, incentive, ambition, drive, longing,
dissatisfaction--all meaningless here, all unknown to these pathetic
tropisms. If you will come with me, you can see for yourself, and
understand."