If one of the First Men could enter the world of the Last Men, he would
find many things familiar and much that would seem strangely distorted
and perverse. But nearly everything that is most distinctive of the last
human species would escape him. Unless he were to be told that behind
all the obvious and imposing features of civilization, behind all the
social organization and personal intercourse of a great community, lay a
whole other world of spiritual culture, round about him, yet beyond his
ken, he would no more suspect its existence than a cat in London
suspects the existence of finance or literature.
[Illustration: Time Scales 4 and 5]
Among the familiar things that he would encounter would be creatures
recognizably human yet in his view grotesque. While he himself laboured
under the weight of his own body, these giants would be easily striding.
He would consider them very sturdy, often thick-set, folk, but he would
be compelled to allow them grace of movement and even beauty of
proportion. The longer he stayed with them the more beauty he would see
in them, and the less complacently would he regard his own type. Some of
these fantastic men and women he would find covered with fur, hirsute,
or mole-velvet, revealing the underlying muscles. Others would display
bronze, yellow, or ruddy skin, and yet others a translucent ashgreen,
warmed by the underflowing blood. As a species, though we are all human,
we are extremely variable in body and mind, so variable that
superficially we seem to be not one species but many. Some characters,
of course, are common to all of us. The traveller might perhaps be
surprised by the large yet sensitive hands which are universal, both in
men and women. In all of us the outermost finger bears at its tip three
minute organs of manipulation, rather similar to those which were first
devised for the Fifth Men. These excrescences would doubtless revolt our
visitor. The pair of occipital eyes, too, would shock him; so would the
upward-looking astronomical eye on the crown, which is peculiar to the
Last Men. This organ was so cunningly designed that, when fully
extended, about a hand-breadth from its bony case, it reveals the
heavens in as much detail as your smaller astronomical telescopes. Apart
from such special features as these, there is nothing definitely novel
about us; though every limb, every contour, shows unmistakably that much
has happened since the days of the First Men. We are both more human and
more animal. The primitive explorer might be more readily impressed by
our animality than our humanity, so much of our humanity would lie
beyond his grasp. He would perhaps at first regard us as a degraded
type. He would call us faun-like, and in particular cases, ape-like,
bear-like, ox-like, marsupial, or elephantine. Yet our general
proportions are definitely human in the ancient manner. Where gravity is
not insurmountable, the erect biped form is bound to be most serviceable
to intelligent land animals; and so, after long wanderings, man has
returned to his old shape. Moreover, if our observer were himself at all
sensitive to facial expression, he would come to recognize in every one
of our innumerable physiognomic types an indescribable but distinctively
human look, the visible sign of that inward and spiritual grace which is
not wholly absent from his own species. He would perhaps say, ‘These men
that are beasts are surely gods also’. He would be reminded of those old
Egyptian deities with animal heads. But in us the animal and the human
interpenetrate in every feature, in every curve of the body, and with
infinite variety. He would observe in us, together with hints of the
long-extinct Mongol, Negro, Nordic, and Semitic, many outlandish
features and expressions, deriving from the subhuman period on Neptune,
or from Venus. He would see in every limb unfamiliar contours of muscle,
sinew, or bone, which were acquired long after the First Men had
vanished. Besides the familiar eye-colours, he would discover orbs of
topaz, emerald, amethyst, and ruby, and a thousand varieties of these.
But in all of us he would see also, if he had discernment, a facial
expression and bodily gesture peculiar to our own species, a certain
luminous, yet pungent and ironical significance, which we miss almost
wholly in the earlier human faces.
The traveller would recognize among us unmistakable sexual features,
both of general proportions and special organs. But it would take him
long to discover that some of the most striking bodily and facial
differences were due to differentiation of the two ancient sexes into
many sub-sexes. Full sexual experience involves for us a complicated
relationship between individuals of all these types. Of the extremely
important sexual groups I shall speak again.
Our visitor would notice, by the way, that, though all persons on
Neptune go habitually nude, save for a pouch or ruck-sack, clothing,
often brightly coloured, and made of diverse lustrous or homely tissues
unknown before our time, is worn for special purposes.
He would notice also, scattered about the green countryside, many
buildings, mostly of one storey; for there is plenty of room on Neptune
even for the million million of the Last Men. Here and there, however,
we have great architectural pylons, cruciform or star-shaped in section,
cloud-piercing, dignifying the invariable planes of Neptune. These
mightiest of all buildings, which are constructed in adamantine
materials formed of artificial atoms, would seem to our visitor
geometrical mountains, far taller than any natural mountain could be,
even on the smallest planet. In many cases the whole fabric is
translucent or transparent, so that at night, with internal
illumination, it appears as an edifice of light. Springing from a base
twenty or more miles across, these star-seeking towers attain a height
where even Neptune’s atmosphere is somewhat attenuated. In their summits
work the hosts of our astronomers, the essential eyes through which our
community, on her little raft, peers across the ocean. Thither also all
men and women repair at one time or another to contemplate this galaxy
of ours and the unnumbered remoter universes. There they perform
together those supreme symbolic acts for which I find no adjective in
your speech but the debased word ’religious’. There also they seek the
refreshment of mountain air in a world where natural mountains are
unknown. And on the pinnacles and precipices of these loftiest horns
many of us gratify that primeval lust of climbing which was ingrained in
man before ever he was man. These buildings thus combine the functions
of observatory, temple, sanatorium, and gymnasium. Some of them are
almost as old as the species, some are not yet completed. They embody,
therefore, many styles. The traveller would find modes which he would be
tempted to call Gothic, Classical, Egyptian, Peruvian, Chinese, or
American, besides a thousand architectural ideas unfamiliar to him. Each
of these buildings was the work of the race as a whole at some stage in
its career. None of them is a mere local product. Every successive
culture has expressed itself in one or more of these supreme monuments.
Once in forty thousand years or so some new architectural glory would be
conceived and executed. And such is the continuity of our cultures that
there has scarcely ever been need to remove the handiwork of the past.
If our visitor happened to be near enough to one of these great pylons,
he would see it surrounded by a swarm of midges, which would turn out to
be human fliers, wingless, but with outspread arms. The stranger might
wonder how a large organism could rise from the ground in Neptune’s
powerful field of gravity. Yet flight is our ordinary means of
locomotion. A man has but to put on a suit of overalls fitted at various
points with radiation-generators. Ordinary flight thus becomes a kind of
aerial swimming. Only when very high speed is desired do we make use of
closed-in air-boats and liners.
At the feet of the great buildings the flat or undulating country is
green, brown, golden, and strewn with houses. Our traveller would
recognize that much land was under cultivation, and would see many
persons at work upon it with tools or machinery. Most of our food,
indeed, is produced by artificial photosynthesis on the broiling planet
Jupiter, where, even now that the sun is becoming normal again, no life
can exist without powerful refrigeration. As far as mere nutrition is
concerned, we could do without vegetation; but agriculture and its
products have played so great a part in human history that today
agricultural operations and vegetable foods are very beneficial to the
race psychologically. And so it comes about that vegetable matter is in
great demand, not only as raw material for innumerable manufactures, but
also for table delicacies. Green vegetables, fruit, and various
alcoholic fruit drinks have come to have the same kind of ritual
significance for us as wine has for you. Meat also, though not a part of
ordinary diet, is eaten on very rare and sacred occasions. The cherished
wild fauna of the planet contributes its toll to periodic symbolical
banquets. And whenever a human being has chosen to die, his body is
ceremoniously eaten by his friends.
Communication with the food-factories of Jupiter and the agricultural
polar regions of the less torrid Uranus, as also with the automatic
mining stations on the glacial outer planets, is maintained by
ether-ships, which, travelling much faster than the planets themselves,
make the passage to the neighbour worlds in a small fraction of the
Neptunian year. These vessels, of which the smallest are about a mile in
length, may be seen descending on our oceans like ducks. Before they
touch the water they cause a prodigious tumult with the downward
pressure of their radiation; but once upon the surface, they pass
quietly into harbour.
The ether-ship is in a manner symbolic of our whole community, so highly
organized is it, and so minute in relation to the void which engulfs it.
The ethereal navigators, because they spend so much of their time in the
empty regions, beyond the range of ‘telepathic’ communication and
sometimes even of mechanical radio, form mentally a unique class among
us. They are a hardy, simple, and modest folk. And though they embody
man’s proud mastery of the ether, they are never tired of reminding
land-lubbers, with dour jocularity, that the most daring voyages are
confined within one drop of the boundless ocean of space.
Recently an exploration ship returned from a voyage into the outer
tracts. Half her crew had died. The survivors were emaciated, diseased,
and mentally unbalanced. To a race that thought itself so well
established in sanity that nothing could disturb it, the spectacle of
these unfortunates was instructive. Throughout the voyage, which was the
longest ever attempted, they had encountered nothing whatever but two
comets and an occasional meteor. Some of the nearer constellations were
seen with altered forms. One or two stars increased slightly in
brightness; and the sun was reduced to being the most brilliant of
stars. The aloof and changeless presence of the constellations seems to
have crazed the voyagers. When at last the ship returned and berthed,
there was a scene such as is seldom witnessed in our modern world. The
crew flung open the ports and staggered blubbering into the arms of the
crowd. It would never have been believed that members of our species
could be so far reduced from the self-possession that is normal to us.
Subsequently these poor human wrecks have shown an irrational phobia of
the stars, and of all that not human. They dare not go out at night.
They live in an extravagant passion for the presence of others. And
since all others are astronomically minded, they cannot find real
companionship. They insanely refuse to participate in the mental life of
the race upon the plane where all things are seen in their just
proportions. They cling piteously to the sweets of individual life; and
so they are led to curse the immensities. They fill their minds with
human conceits, and their houses with toys. By night they draw the
curtains and drown the quiet voice of the stars in revelry. But it is a
joyless and a haunted revelry, desired less for itself than as a defence
against reality.