When some three thousand years had passed since his beginning, the
unique individual determined to create others of his kind. Not that he
suffered from loneliness. Not that he yearned for love, or even for
intellectual companionship. But solely for the undertaking of more
profound research, he needed the cooperation of beings of his own mental
stature. He therefore designed, and had built in various regions of the
planet, turrets and factories like his own, though greatly improved.
Into each he sent, by his servants, a cell of his own vestigial body,
and directed how it should be cultivated so as to produce a new
individual. At the same time he caused far-reaching operations to be
performed upon himself, so that he should be remade upon a more ample
plan. Of the new capacities which he inculcated in himself and his
progeny the most important was direct sensitivity to radiation. This was
achieved by incorporating in each brain-tissue a specially bred strain
of Martian parasites. These henceforth were to live in the great brain
as integral members of each one of its cells. Each brain was also
equipped with a powerful wireless transmitting apparatus. Thus should
the widely scattered sessile population maintain direct ‘telepathic’
contact with one another.
The undertaking was successfully accomplished. Some ten thousand of
these new individuals, each specialized for his particular locality and
office, now constituted the Fourth Men. On the highest mountains were
super-astronomers with vast observatories, whose instruments were partly
artificial, partly natural excrescences of their own brains. In the very
entrails of the planet others, specially adapted to heat, studied the
subterranean forces, and were kept in ‘telepathic’ union with the
astronomers. In the tropics, in the Arctic, in the forests, the deserts,
and on the ocean floor, the Fourth Men indulged their immense curiosity;
and in the homeland, around the father of the race, a group of great
buildings housed a hundred individuals. In the service of this
world-wide population, those races of Third Men which had originally
cooperated to produce the new human species tilled the land, tended the
cattle, manufactured the immense material requisites of the new
civilization, and satisfied their spirits with an ever more stereotyped
ritual of their vital art. This degradation of the whole race to a
menial position had occurred slowly, imperceptibly. But the result was
none the less irksome. Occasionally there were sparks of rebellion, but
they always failed to kindle serious trouble; for the prestige and
persuasiveness of the Fourth Men were irresistible.
At length, however, a crisis occurred. For some three thousand years the
Fourth Men had pursued their research with constant success, but
latterly progress had been slow. It was becoming increasingly difficult
to devise new lines of research. True, there was still much detail to be
filled in, even in their knowledge of their own planet, and very much in
their knowledge of the stars. But there was no prospect of opening up
entirely new fields which might throw some light on the essential nature
of things. Indeed, it began to dawn on them that they had scarcely
plumbed a surface ripple of the ocean of mystery. Their knowledge seemed
to them perfectly systematic, yet wholly enigmatic. They had a growing
sense that though in a manner they knew almost everything, they really
knew nothing.
The normal mind, when it experiences intellectual frustration, can seek
recreation in companionship, or physical exercise, or art. But for the
Fourth Men there was no such escape. These activities were impossible
and meaningless to them. The Great Brains were whole-heartedly
interested in the objective world, but solely as a vast stimulus to
intellection, never for its own sake. They admired only the intellective
process itself and the interpretative formulae and principles which it
devised. They cared no more for men and women than for material in a
test-tube, no more for one another than for mechanical calculators. Nay,
of each one of them it might almost be said that he cared ever for
himself solely as an instrument of knowing. Many of the species had
actually sacrificed their sanity, even in some cases their lives, to the
obsessive lust of intellection.
As the sense of frustration became more and more oppressive, the Fourth
Men suffered more and more from the onesidedness of their nature. Though
so completely dispassionate while their intellectual life proceeded
smoothly, now that it was thwarted they began to be confused by foolish
whims and cravings which they disguised from themselves under a cloak of
excuses. Sessile and incapable of affection, they continually witnessed
the free movement, the group life, the love-making of their menials.
Such activities became an offence to them, and filled them with a cold
jealousy, which it was altogether beneath their dignity to notice. The
affairs of the serf-population began to be conducted by their masters
with less than the accustomed justice. Serious grievances arose.
The climax occurred in connexion with a great revival of research,
which, it was said, would break down the impalpable barriers and set
knowledge in progress again. The Great Brains were to be multiplied a
thousandfold, and the resources of the whole planet were to be devoted
far more strictly than before to the crusade of intellection. The menial
Third Men would therefore have to put up with more work and less
pleasure. Formerly they would willingly have accepted this fate for the
glory of serving the superhuman brains. But the days of their blind
devotion were past. It was murmured among them that the great experiment
of their forefathers had proved a great disaster, and that the Fourth
Men, the Great Brains, in spite of their devilish cunning, were mere
abortions.
Matters came to a head when the tyrants announced that all useless
animals must be slaughtered, since their upkeep was too great an
economic burden upon the world-community. The vital art, moreover, was
to be practised in future only by the Great Brains themselves. This
announcement threw the Third Men into violent excitement, and divided
them into two parties. Many of those whose lives were spent in direct
service of the Great Brains favoured implicit obedience, though even
these were deeply distressed. The majority, on the other hand,
absolutely refused to permit the impious slaughter, or even to surrender
their privileges as vital artists. For, they said, to kill off the fauna
of the planet would be to violate the fair form of the universe by
blotting out many of its most beautiful features. It would be an outrage
to the Life God, and he would surely avenge it. They therefore urged
that the time was come for all true human beings to stand together and
depose the tyrants. And this, they pointed out, could easily be done. It
was only necessary to cut a few electric cables, connecting the Great
Brains with the subterranean generating stations. The electric pumps
would then cease to supply the brain-turrets with aerated blood. Or, in
the few cases in which the Great Brains were so located that they could
control their own source of power in wind or water, it was necessary
merely to refrain from transporting food to their digestion
laboratories.
The personal attendants of the Great Brains shrank from such action; for
their whole lives had been devoted, proudly and even in a manner
lovingly, to service of the revered beings. But the agriculturists
determined to withhold supplies. The Great Brains, therefore, armed
their servitors with a diversity of ingenious weapons. Immense
destruction was done; but since the rebels were decimated, there were
not enough hands to work the fields. Some of the Great Brains, and many
of their servants, actually died of starvation. And as hardship
increased, the servants themselves began to drift over to the rebels. It
now seemed certain to the Third Men that the Great Brains would very
soon be impotent, and the plant once more under the control of natural
beings. But the tyrants were not to be so easily defeated. Already for
some centuries they had been secretly experimenting with a means of
gaining a far more thorough dominion over the natural species. At the
eleventh hour they succeeded.
In this undertaking they had been favoured by the results which a
section of the natural species itself had produced long ago in the
effort to breed specialized communicants to keep in touch with the
unseen world. That sect, or theocratic nation, which had striven for
many centuries toward this goal, had finally attained what they regarded
as success. There came into existence an hereditary caste of
communicants. Now, though these beings were subject to mediumistic
trances in which they apparently conversed with denizens of the other
world and received instructions about the ordering of matters
terrestrial, they were in fact merely abnormally suggestible. Trained
from childhood in the lore of the unseen world, their minds, during the
trance, were amazingly fertile in developing fantasies based on that
lore. Left to themselves, they were merely folk who were abnormally
lacking in initiative and intelligence. Indeed, so naïve were they, and
so sluggish, that they were mentally more like cattle than human beings.
Yet under the influence of suggestion they became both intelligent and
vigorous. Their intelligence, however, operating strictly in service of
the suggestion, was wholly incapable of criticizing the suggestion
itself.
There is no need to revert to the downfall of this theocratic society,
beyond saying that, since both private and public affairs were regulated
by reference to the sayings of the communicants, inevitably the state
fell into chaos. The other community of the Third Men, that which was
engaged upon breeding the Great Brains, gradually dominated the whole
planet. The mediumistic stock, however, remained in existence, and was
treated with a half-contemptuous reverence. The mediums were still
generally regarded as in some manner specially gifted with the divine
spirit, but they were now thought to be too holy for their sayings to
have any relation to mundane affairs.
It was by means of this mediumistic stock that the Great Brains had
intended to consolidate their position. Their earlier efforts may be
passed over. But in the end they produced a race of living and even
intelligent machines whose will they could control absolutely, even at a
great distance. For the new variety of Third Men was ‘telepathically’
united with its masters. Martian units had been incorporated in its
nervous system.
At the last moment the Great Brains were able to put into the field an
army of these perfect slaves, which they equipped with the most
efficient lethal weapons. The remnant of original servants discovered
too late that they had been helping to produce their supplanters. They
joined the rebels, only to share in the general destruction. In a few
months all the Third Men, save the new docile variety, were destroyed;
except for a few specimens which were preserved in cages for
experimental purposes. And in a few years every type of animal that was
not known to be directly or indirectly necessary to human life had been
exterminated. None were preserved even as specimens, for the Great
Brains had already studied them through and through.
But though the Great Brains were now absolute possessors of the Earth,
they were after all no nearer their goal than before. The actual
struggle with the natural species had provided them with an aim; but now
that the struggle was over, they began to be obsessed once more with
their intellectual failure. With painful clarity they realized that, in
spite of their vast weight of neural tissue, in spite of their immense
knowledge and cunning, they were practically no nearer the ultimate
truth than their predecessors had been. Both were infinitely far from
it.
For the Fourth Men, the Great Brains, there was no possible life but the
life of intellect; and the life of intellect had become barren.
Evidently something more than mere bulk of brain was needed for the
solving of the deeper intellectual problems. They must, therefore,
somehow create a new brain-quality, or organic formation of brain,
capable of a mode of vision or insight impossible in their present
state. They must learn somehow to remake their own brain-tissues upon a
new plan. With this aim, and partly through unwitting jealousy of the
natural and more balanced species which had created them, they began to
use their captive specimens of that species for a great new enterprise
of research into the nature of human brain-tissue. It was hoped thus to
find some hint of the direction in which the new evolutionary leap
should take place. The unfortunate specimens were therefore submitted to
a thousand ingenious physiological and psychological tortures. Some were
kept alive with their brains spread out permanently on a laboratory
table, for microscopic observation during their diverse psychological
reactions. Others were put into fantastic states of mental abnormality.
Others were maintained in perfect health of body and mind, only to be
felled at last by some ingeniously contrived tragic experience. New
types were produced which, it was hoped, might show evidence of
emergence into a qualitatively higher mode of mentality; but in fact
they succeeded only in ranging through the whole gamut of insanity.
The research continued for some thousands of years, but gradually
slackened, so utterly barren did it prove to be. As this frustration
became more and more evident, a change began to come over the minds of
the Fourth Men.
They knew, of course, that the natural species valued many things and
activities which they themselves did not appreciate at all. Hitherto
this had seemed a symptom merely of the low mental development of the
natural species. But the behaviour of the unfortunate specimens upon
whom they had been experimenting had gradually given the Fourth Men a
greater insight into the likings and admirations of the natural species,
so that they had learned to distinguish between those desires which were
fundamental and those merely accidental cravings which clear thinking
would have dismissed. In fact, they came to see that certain activities
and certain objects were appreciated by these beings with the same
clear-sighted conviction as they themselves appreciated knowledge. For
instance, the natural human beings valued one another, and were
sometimes capable of sacrificing themselves for the sake of others. They
also valued love itself. And again they valued very seriously their
artistic activities; and the activities of their bodies and of animal
bodies appeared to them to have intrinsic excellence.
Little by little the Fourth Men began to realize that what was wrong
with themselves was not merely their intellectual limitation, but, far
more seriously, the limitation of their insight into values. And this
weakness, they saw, was the result, not of paucity of intellective
brain, but of paucity of body and lower brain tissues. This defect they
could not remedy. It was obviously impossible to remake themselves so
radically that they should become of a more normal type. Should they
concentrate their efforts upon the production of new individuals more
harmonious than themselves? Such a work, it might be supposed, would
have seemed unattractive to them. But no. They argued thus. ‘It is our
nature to care most for knowing. Full knowledge is to be attained only
by minds both more penetrating and more broadly based than ours. Let us,
therefore, waste no more time in seeking to achieve the goal in
ourselves. Let us seek rather to produce a kind of being, free from our
limitations, in whom we may attain the goal of perfect knowledge
vicariously. The producing of such a being will exercise all our powers,
and will afford the highest kind of fulfilment possible to us. To
refrain from this work would be irrational.’
Thus it came about that the artificial Fourth Men began to work in a new
spirit upon the surviving specimens of the Third Men to produce their
own supplanters.