The plan of the proposed new human being was worked out in great detail
before any attempt was made to produce an actual individual. Essentially
he was to be a normal human organism, with all the bodily functions of
the natural type; but he was to be perfected through and through. Care
must be taken to give him the greatest possible bulk of brain compatible
with such a general plan, but no more. Very carefully his creators
calculated the dimensions and internal proportions which their creature
must have. His brain could not be nearly as large as their own, since he
would have to carry it about with him, and maintain it with his own
physiological machinery. On the other hand, if it was to be at all
larger than the natural brain, the rest of the organism must be
proportionately sturdy. Like the Second Men, the new species must be
titanic. Indeed, it must be such as to dwarf even those natural giants.
The body, however, must not be so huge as to be seriously hampered by
its own weight, and by the necessity of having bones so massive as to be
unmanageable.
In working out the general proportions of the new man, his makers took
into account the possibility of devising more efficient bone and muscle.
After some centuries of patient experiment they did actually invent a
means of inducing in germ cells a tendency toward far stronger
bone-tissues and far more powerful muscle. At the same time they devised
nerve-tissues more highly specialized for their particular functions.
And in the new brain, so minute compared with their own, smallness was
to be compensated for by efficiency of design, both in the individual
cells and in their organization.
Further, it was found possible to economize somewhat in bulk and vital
energy by improvements in the digestive system. Certain new models of
micro-organisms were produced, which, living symbiotically in the human
gut, should render the whole process of digestion easier, more rapid,
and less erratic.
Special attention was given to the system of self-repair in all tissues,
especially in those which had hitherto been the earliest to wear out.
And at the same time the mechanism regulating growth and general
senescence was so designed that the new man should reach maturity at the
age of two hundred years, and should remain in full vigour for at least
three thousand years, when, with the first serious symptom of decay, his
heart should suddenly cease functioning. There had been some dispute
whether the new being should be endowed with perennial life, like his
makers. But in the end it had been decided that, since he was intended
only as a transitional type, it would be safer to allow him only a
finite, though a prolonged lifetime. There must be no possibility that
he should be tempted to regard himself as life’s final expression.
In sensory equipment, the new man was to have all the advantages of the
Second and Third Men, and, in addition a still wider range and finer
discrimination in every sense organ. More important was the
incorporation of Martian units in the new model of germ cell. As the
organism developed, these should propagate themselves and congregate in
the cells of the brain, so that every brain area might be sensitive to
ethereal vibrations, and the whole might emit a strong system of
radiation. But care was taken so that this ‘telepathic’ faculty of the
new species should remain subordinate. There must be no danger that the
individual should become a mere resonator of the herd.
Long drawn out chemical research enabled the Fourth Men to design also
far-reaching improvements in the secretions of the new man, so that he
should maintain both a perfect physiological equilibrium, and a
well-balanced temperament. For they were determined that though he
should experience all the range of emotional life, his passions should
not run into disastrous excess; nor should he be prone to some one
emotion in season and out of season. It was necessary also to revise in
great detail the whole system of natural reflexes, abolishing some,
modifying others, and again strengthening others. All the more complex,
‘instinctive’ responses, which had persisted in man since the days of
Pithecanthropus Erectus, had also to be meticulously revised, both in
respect of the form of the activity and the objects upon which they
should be instinctively directed. Anger, fear, curiosity, humour,
tenderness, egoism, sexual passion, and sociality must all be possible,
but never uncontrollable. In fact, as with the Second Men, but more
emphatically, the new type was to have an innate aptitude for, and
inclination toward, all those higher activities and objects which, in
the First Men, were only achieved after laborious discipline. Thus,
while the design included self-regard, it also involved a disposition to
prize the self chiefly as a social and intellectual being, rather than
as a primeval savage. And while it included strong sociality, the group
upon which instinctive interest was to be primarily directed was to be
nothing less than the organized community of all minds. And again, while
it included vigorous primitive sexuality and parenthood, it provided
also those innate ‘sublimations’ which had occurred in the second
species; for instance, the native aptitude for altruistic love of
individual spirits of every kind, and for art and religion. Only by a
miracle of pure intellectual skill could the cold-natured Great Brains,
who were themselves doomed never to have actual experience of such
activities, contrive, merely by study of the Third Men, to see their
importance, and to design an organism splendidly capable of them. It was
much as though a blind race, after studying physics, should invent
organs of sight.
It was recognized, of course, that in a race in which the average
life-span should be counted in thousands of years, procreation must be
very rare. Yet it was also recognized that, for full development of
mind, not only sexual intercourse but parenthood was necessary in both
sexes. This difficulty was overcome partly by designing a very prolonged
infancy and childhood; which, necessary in themselves for the proper
mental and physical growth of these complicated organisms, provided also
a longer exercise of parenthood for the mature. At the same time the
actual process of child-birth was designed to be as easy as among the
Third Men. And it was expected that with its greatly improved
physiological organization the infant would not need that anxious and
absorbing care which had so seriously hobbled most mothers among the
earlier races.
The mere sketching out of these preliminary specifications of an
improved human being involved many centuries of research and calculation
which taxed even the ingenuity of the Great Brains. Then followed a
lengthy period of tentative experiment in the actual production of such
a type. For some thousands of years little was done but to show that
many promising lines of attack were after all barren. And several times
during this period the whole work was held up by disagreements among the
Great Brains themselves as to the policy to be adopted. Once, indeed,
they took to violence, one party attacking the other with chemicals,
microbes, and armies of human automata.
In short it was only after many failures, and after many barren epochs
during which, for a variety of reasons, the enterprise was neglected,
that the Fourth Men did at length fashion two individuals almost
precisely of the type they had originally designed. These were produced
from a single fertilized ovum, in laboratory conditions. Identical
twins, but of opposite sexes, they became the Adam and Eve of a new and
glorious human species, the Fifth Men.
It may fittingly be said of the Fifth Men that they were the first to
attain true human proportions of body and mind. On the average they were
more than twice as tall as the First Men, and much taller than the
Second Men. Their lower limbs had therefore to be extremely massive
compared with the torso which they had to support. Thus, upon the ample
pedestal of their feet, they stood like columns of masonry. Yet though
their proportions were in a manner elephantine, there was a remarkable
precision and even delicacy in the volumes that composed them. Their
great arms and shoulders, dwarfed somewhat by their still mightier legs,
were instruments not only of power but also of fine adjustment. Their
hands also were fashioned both for power and for minute control; for,
while the thumb and forefinger constituted a formidable vice, the
delicate sixth finger had been induced to divide its tip into two
Lilliputian fingers and a corresponding thumb. The contours of the limbs
were sharply visible, for the body bore no hair, save for a close, thick
skullcap which, in the original stock, was of ruddy brown. The
well-marked eyebrows, when drawn down, shaded the sensitive eyes from
the sun. Elsewhere there was no need of hair, for the brown skin had
been so ingeniously contrived that it maintained an even temperature
alike in tropical and sub-Arctic climates, with no aid either from hair
or clothes. Compared with the great body, the head was not large, though
the brain-capacity was twice that of the Second Men. In the original
pair of individuals the immense eyes were of a deep violet, the features
strongly moulded and mobile. These facial characters had not been
specially designed, for they seemed unimportant to the Fourth Men; but
the play of biological forces resulted in a face not unlike that of the
Second Men, though with an added and indescribable expression which no
human face had hitherto attained.
How from this pair of individuals the new population gradually arose;
how at first it was earnestly fostered by its creators; how it
subsequently asserted its independence and took control of its own
destiny; how the Great Brains failed piteously to understand and
sympathize with the mentality of their creatures, and tried to tyrannize
over them; how for a while the planet was divided into two mutually
intolerant communities, and was at last drenched with man’s blood, until
the human automata were exterminated, the Great Brains starved or blown
to pieces, and the Fifth Men themselves decimated; how, as a result of
these events, a dense fog of barbarism settled once more upon the
planet, so that the Fifth Men, like so many other races, had after all
to start rebuilding civilization and culture from its very foundations;
how all these things befell we must not in detail observe.