Star Begotten is a 1937 novel by H. G. Wells. It tells the story of a series of men who conjecture upon the possibility of the human race being altered by Martians to replace their own dying planet. The protagonist of the story Joseph Davis, who is an author of popular histories, becomes overtaken with suspicion that he and his family have already been exposed and are starting to change.

genre : Science Fiction

2 hour and 44 minute

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Star-begotten

H. G. Wells

Published: 1937

Categorie(s): Fiction, Science Fiction, Short Stories

Source: http://gutenberg.net.au About Wells:

Herbert George Wells, better known as H. G. Wells, was an English writer best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau. He was a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and produced works in many different genres, including contemporary novels, history, and social commentary. He was also an outspoken socialist. His later works become increasingly political and didactic, and only his early science fiction novels are widely read today. Wells, along with Hugo Gernsback and Jules Verne, is sometimes referred to as "The Father of Science Fiction". Source: Wikipedia

Also available on Feedbooks Wells:

- The War of the Worlds (1898)

- The Time Machine (1895)

- A Modern Utopia (1905)

- The Invisible Man (1897)

- Tales of Space and Time (1900)

- The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)

- The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904)

- The Sleeper Awakes (1910)

- The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost (1902)

- The First Men in the Moon (1901)

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Chapter 1 The Mind of Mr. Joseph Davis Is Greatly Troubled

1.

This is the story of an idea and how it played about in the minds of a number of intelligent people.

Whether there was any reality behind this idea it is not the business of the storyteller to say. The reader must judge for himself. One man believed it without the shadow of a doubt and he shall be the principal figure in the story.

Maybe we have not heard the last of this idea. It spread from the talk of a few people into magazines and the popular press. It had a vogue. You certainly heard of it at the time though perhaps you have forgotten. Popular attention waned. Now the thing flickers about in people's minds, not quite dead and not quite alive, disconnected and ineffective. It is a queer and almost incredible idea, but yet not absolutely incredible. It is a bare possibility that this thing is really going on.

This idea arose in the mind of Mr. Joseph Davis, a man of letters, a sensitive, intelligent, and cultivated man. It came to him when he was in a state of neurasthenia, when the strangest ideas may invade and find a lodgment in the mind.

2.

The idea was born, so to speak, one morning in November at the Planetarium Club,

Yet perhaps before we describe its impact upon Mr. Joseph Davis in the club smoking-room after lunch, it may be well to tell the reader a few things about him.

We will begin right at the beginning. He was born just at the turn of the century and about the vernal equinox. He had come into the world with a lively and precocious intelligence and his 'quickness' had been the joy of his mother and his nurses. And, after the manner of our kind, he had clutched at the world, squinted at it, and then looked straight at it, got hold of things and put them in his mouth, begun to imitate, begun to make and then interpret sounds, and so developed his picture of this strange world in which we live.

His nurse told him things and sang to him; his mother sang to him and told him things; a nursery governess arrived in due course to tell him things, and then a governess and a school and lot of people and pictures and little books in words of one syllable and then normal polysyllabic books and a large mellifluous parson and various husky small boys and indeed a great miscellany of people went on telling him things and telling him things. And so continually, his picture of this world, and his conception of himself and what he would have to do, and ought to do and wanted to do, grew clearer.

But it was only very gradually that he began to realize that there was something about his picture of the universe that perhaps wasn't in the pictures of the universe of all the people about him. On the whole the universe they gave him had an air of being real and true and just there and nothing else. There were, they intimated, good things that were simply good and bad things that were awful and rude things that you must never even think of, and there were good people and bad people and simply splendid people, people you had to like and admire and obey and people you were against, people who were rich and prosecuted you if you trespassed and ran over you with motor cars if you did not look out, and people who were poor and did things for you for small sums, and it was all quite nice and clear and definite and you went your way amidst it all circumspectly and happily, laughing not infrequently.

Only—and this was a thing that came to him by such imperceptible degrees that at no time was he able to get it in such a way that he could ask questions about it—ever and again there was an effect as though this sure and certain established world was just in some elusive manner at this point or that point translucent, translucent and a little threadbare, and as though something else quite different lay behind it. It was never transparent. It was commonly, nine days out of ten, a full, complete universe and then for a moment, for a phase, for a perplexing interval, it was as if it was a painted screen that hid—What did it hide?

They told him that a God of Eastern Levantine origin, the God of Abraham (who evidently had a stupendous bosom) and Isaac and Jacob, had made the whole universe, stars and atoms, from start to finish in six days and made it wonderfully and perfect, and had set it all going and, after some necessary ennuis called the Fall and the Flood, had developed arrangements that were to culminate in the earthly happiness and security and eternal bliss of our Joseph, which had seemed to him a very agreeable state of affairs. And farther they had shown him the most convincing pictures of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and had given him a Noah's Ark to play with and told him simple Bible stories about the patriarchs and the infant Samuel and Solomon and David and their remarkable lessons for us, the promise of salvation spreading out from the Eastern Levant until it covered the world, and he had taken it all in without flinching because at the time he had no standards of comparison. Anything might be as true as anything else. Except for the difference in colour they put him into the world of Green Pastures and there they trained him to be a simply believing little Anglican.

And yet at the same time he found a book in the house with pictures of animals that were quite unlike any of the animals that frequented the Garden of Eden or entered the Ark. And pictures of men of a pithecoid unpleasant type who had lived, it seemed, long before Adam and Eve were created. It seemed all sorts of thing had been going on before Adam and Eve were created, but when he began to develop a curiosity about this pre-scriptural world and to ask questions about it his current governess snapped his head off and hid that disconcerting book away. They were 'just antediluvian animals,' she said, and Noah had not troubled to save them. And when he had remarked that a lot of them could swim, she told him not to try to be a Mr. Cleverkins.

He did his best not to be Mr. Cleverkins. He did his best to love this God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as well as fear him (which he did horribly, more even than he did the gorilla in Wood's Natural History) and to be overcome with gratitude for the wisdom and beauty of a scheme of things which first of all damned him to hell-fire before he was born and then went to what he couldn't help thinking were totally unnecessary pains on the part of omnipotence to save him. Why should omnipotence do that? What need He do that? All He had to do was just to say it. He had made the whole world by just saying it.

Master Joseph did his very best to get his feelings properly adjusted to the established conception of the universe. And since most of the scriptures concerned events that were now happily out of date, and since his mother, his governess, the mellifluous parson, the scripture teacher at school, and everybody set in authority over him converged in assuring him that now, at the price of a little faith and conformity, things were absolutely all right here and hereafter so far as he was concerned, he did get through some years pretty comfortably. He did not think about it too much. He put it all away from him—until the subtle alchemy of growth as he became adolescent sent queer winds of inquiry and correlation banging open again unsorted cupboards of his brain.

He went to St. Hobart's school and then to Camborne Hall, Oxford. There is much unreasonable criticism of the English public schools, but it is indisputable that they do give a sort of education to an elect percentage of their boys. There was quite a lot of lively discussion at St. Hobart's in those days, it wasn't one of your mere games-and-cram schools, and the reaction against the dogmatic materialism of the later nineteenth century was in full swing there. The head in his sermons and the staff generally faced up to the fact that there had been Doubt, and that the boys ought to know about it.

The science master was in a minority of one on the staff and he came up to St. Hobart's by way of a technical school; the public school spirit cowed him. St. Hobart's did not ignore science but it despised the stuff, and all the boys were given some science so that they could see just what it was like.

Davis because of his mental quickness had specialized in the classical side; nevertheless he did his minimum of public school science. He burnt his fingers with hot glass and smashed a number of beakers during a brief interlude of chemistry, and he thought biology the worst of stinks. He found the outside of rabbit delightful but the inside made him sick; it made him physically sick. He acquired a great contempt for 'mere size' and that kept astronomy in its place. And when he came to grips with doubt, in preparation for confirmation, he realized that he had been much too crude in feeling uncomfortable about that early Bible narrative and the scheme of salvation and all the rest of it. As a matter-of-fact statement it was not perhaps in the coarser sense true, but that was because of the infirmities of language and the peculiar low state of Eastern Levantine intelligence and Eastern Levantine moral ideas when the hour to 'reveal' religion had struck. Great resort had had to be made for purposes of illustration to symbols, parables, and inaccurate but edifying stories. People like David and Jacob had been poor material for demonstration purposes, but that was a point better disregarded.

The story of creation was symbolical and its failure to correspond with the succession of life on earth did not matter in the least, the Fall was symbolical of things too mysterious to explain, and why there had to be an historical redemption when the historical fall had vanished into thin air was the sort of thing no competent theologian would dream of discussing. There it was. Through such matters of faith and doctrine Joseph Davis was taken at a considerable speed, which left him hustled and baffled rather than convinced.

But the curious thing about these initiatory explanations was that all the time another set of ideas at an entirely different level was being put before him as a complete justification for the uncritical acceptance of Bible, Church, and Creed. It was being conveyed to him that it really did not matter what foundations of myth or fantasy the existing system of Western civilization was built upon; the fact that mattered was that it was built upon that foundation and that a great ritual of ceremonial and observance, which might be logically unmeaning, and an elaborate code of morality, which might ultimately prove to be arbitrary, nevertheless constituted the co-ordinating fabric of current social life and that social life could not now go on without them. So that all this freethinker and rationalist stuff became irrelevant and indeed contemptibly crude. Reasonable men didn't assert. They didn't deny. They were thinking and living at a different level. You could no more reconstruct religion, social usage, political tradition, than you could replan the human skeleton—which also was open to considerable criticism.

That put Joseph Davis in his place. Arguments about the Garden of Eden and Jonah's Whale passed out of discussion. He was left face to face with history and society. Christianity and its churches, the monarchy and political institutions, the social hierarchy, seemed to be regarding him blandly. It is no good inquiring into our credentials now, they seemed to say. Here we are. We work. (They seemed to be working then.) And what other reality is there?

By this time he was at Oxford, talking and thinking occasionally, pretending to think a lot and believing that he was thinking a lot. The dualism that had dawned upon him in childhood looked less like being resolved than ever. The world-that-is no longer contested his fundamental criticisms, but it challenged him to produce any alternative world-that-might-be. There it was, the ostensible world, definite, fundamentally inconsistent maybe, but consistent in texture. An immense accumulation of falsity and yet a going concern. So things are.

It looked so enduring. He wavered for a time. On one hand was the brightly lit story of current things, the front-window story, a mother's-knee story of a world made all for his reception, a world of guidance, safe government, a plausible social order, institutions beyond effective challenge, a sure triumph for good behaviour and a clear definition of right and wrong, of what was done and what was not done, and against it was no more than a shadow story which was told less by positive statement than by hints, discords that stirred beneath the brightness, murmurs from beneath, and vague threats from incidental jars. That shadow world, that mere criticism of accepted things, had no place for him, offered him nothing. No shapes appeared there but only interrogations. The brightly lit story seemed safest, brightest, and best to his ripening imagination; he did his best to thrust that other tale down among all sorts of other things, improper and indecent thoughts for example, that have to be kept under hatches in the mind.

Momentous decisions have to be made by all of us in those three or four undergraduate years; we take our road, and afterwards there is small opportunity for a return. Mr. Joseph Davis had a quick mind and a facile pen and he was already writing, and writing rather well, before he came down. He chose to write anyhow. His father had left him with a comfortable income and there was no mercenary urgency upon him. He elected to write about the braver, more confident aspects of life. He was for the show. He began to write heartening and stalwart books and to gird remorselessly at dissidence and doubt. What I write, he said, shall have banners in it and trumpets and drums. No carping, nothing subversive. Sociology is going out of fashion. So he committed himself. He began first with some successful, brave historical romances and followed up with short histories of this or that gallant interlude in the record.

King Richard and Saladin was his first book and then he wrote The Singing Seamen. Then came Smite with Hammer, Smite with Sword, and after that he ran up and down the human tree, telling of the jolly adventures of Alexander and Caesar and Jenghiz Khan (The Mighty Riders) and the Elizabethan pirates and explorers and so on. But as he had a sound instinct for good writing and an exceptionally sensitive nature, the more he wrote, the more he read and learned and—which was the devil of it—thought.

He should not have thought. When he took his side he should, like a sensible man, have stopped thinking.

Besides which some people criticized him rather penetratingly, and for an out-and-out champion he was much too attentive to criticism.

He became infected with a certain hesitation about what he .was doing. Perhaps he was undergoing that first subtle deterioration from that assurance of youth which is called 'growing up,' a phase that may occur at any age. He wrote with diminishing ease and confidence and let qualifying shadows creep into his heroic portraits. He would sometimes admit quite damaging things, and then apologize. He found this enhanced the solidity of some of his figures, but it cast a shadow on his forthright style. He told no one of this loss of inner elasticity, but he worried secretly about it.

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Then, courageously but perhaps unwisely, he resolved to make a grand culminating frontal attack upon the doubt, materialism, and pessimism of shadowland, in the form of a deliberately romanticized history of mankind. It was to be a world history justifying the ways of God to man. It was also to justify his own ways to himself. It was to be a great parade—a cavalcade of humanity.

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For some reason he never made clear to himself, he did not begin at the creation of the world but on the plain of Shinar. He put the earlier history into the mouths of retrospective wise old men. From the Tower of Babel man dispersed about the world.

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History regarded with a right-minded instinct has often a superficial appearance of being only a complicated tangle still awaiting analysis, and it was not always easy to show Man winning all the time and Right for ever triumphant against the odds—in the long run, that is. The Heritage of Mankind, the Promise and the Struggle—that was one of the tides he was considering—implies a struggle with, among other things, malignant fact. Fact sometimes can be very obstinate and malignant.

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He had got himself into a tangle with the Black Death. He had started—rashly, he was beginning to realize—upon a chapter dealing with the ennobling effect of disease, one of three to be called respectively, Flood, Fire, and Pestilence; and that had led him into a considerable amount of special reading. He had always been for taking his own where he found it, and he had been inspired by Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters to annex some of that writer's material, infuse it with religious devotion, and then extend his discourse to show how throughout the ages these black visitations, properly regarded, had been glorious stimulants (happily no longer urgently needed) for the human soul. But he found the records of exemplary human behaviour during the Black Death period disconcertingly meagre. The stress was all on the horror of the time, and when everything was said and done, our species emerged hardly better in its reactions than a stampede of poisoned rats. That at any rate was how the confounded records showed things. And this in spite of his heroic efforts to read between the lines and in spite of his poetic disposition to supplement research with a little invention—intuition, let us say, rather than invention. That he knew was a dangerous disposition. Too much intuition might bring down the disparagement of some scholarly but unsympathetic pedant upon him, and all the other fellows would be only too glad to pick it up and repeat it.

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And then suddenly his mind began to slip and slide. He had, he realized, been overworking and, what is so common an aspect of overwork, he could not leave off. Overwork had brought worry and sleeplessness in its train. He would lie awake thinking of the Black Death and the pitiful behaviour to which tormented humanity can sink. Vivid descriptive phrases in the old records it would have been healthier to forget, recurred to him. At first it was only the Black Death that distressed him and then his faith in human splendour began to collapse more widely. A cracked handbell heralded an open cart through the streets of plague-stricken London and once more the people were called upon to bring out the dead. Something revived his memory of the horror pictures of Goya in the Prado, and that dragged up the sinister paintings in the Wiertz Museum in Brussels. That again carried him to the underside in Napoleon's career and the heaped dead of the Great War. Why write a Grand Parade of Humanity, asked doubt, when Winwood Reade has already written The Martyrdom of Man? He found himself criticising his early book about Alexander the Great, Youth the Conqueror.

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He had told that story triumphantly. Now in the black morning hours, it came back upon him in reverse. Something in his own brain confronted him and challenged him. Your Alexander, it said, your great Alexander, the pupil of Aristotle, who was, as you say, the master mind of the world, was in truth, as you know, just an ill-educated spendthrift. Why do you try to pervert the facts? By sheer accident—and most history is still a tale of accidents—he found himself in a rotten, nerveless self-indulgent world that had no grown men in it able to hold him out and give him the spanking he deserved, and as luck would have it, he had the only up-to-date and seasoned army in existence completely at his disposal. He hadn't made it. It came to him. The fools went where he told them to go. When you wrote all that stuff about his taking Greek civilization to Persia and Egypt and India, you were merely giving him credit for what had happened already. Why? Greek civilization owed nothing to him. He took advantage of it. He picked it up and smashed it over the head of poor old Darius. Smashed it—just as these plunging dictators of today seem likely to smash your poor civilization—nobody able to gainsay them. He left the Glory that was Greece in fragments, for the Romans to pick up in their turn. He wasted the Macedonian cavalry and phalanx, just as our fools today are going to waste aviation. For no good at all; for no plain result. Alexander was just a witless accident in an aimless world. And think of his massacres and lootings and how it fared with the women and children, the common life of the world. Why did you write this florid stuff about Alexander the Great? And about Caesar—and about all these other pitiful heroes of mankind? Why do you keep it up, Joseph? If you did not know better then, you know better now. Your newspapers should be teaching you. Why do you pretend that a sort of destiny was unrolling? That it was all leading up to Anglicanism, cricket, the British Empire, and what not? Why do you go on with these pretences? These great men of yours never existed. The human affair is more intricate than that. More touching. Saints are sinners and philosophers are fools. Religions are rigmaroles. If there is gold it is still in the quartz. Look reality in the face. Then maybe something might be done about it.

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He got up. He walked about his room.

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'But I thought I had settled all this years ago,' he said. 'How can I get on with Grand Parade of Humanity if I give way to this sort of thing? Already I have spent nearly a year on this overwhelming book.'

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He felt like some ancient hermit assailed by diabolical questionings. But that ancient hermit would at least have prayed and made the sign of the cross and got over it.

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In his solitude Mr. Joseph Davis tried that. But on his knees he had a frightful sense of play-acting. He didn't believe there was a hearer. He didn't believe that any one believes nowadays—not Cantuar, not Ebor, not the Pope. These old boys eased down on their knees out of habit and let their minds wander along a neglected familiar lane to nothing in particular.

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He got up again with his prayer half said and sat staring at the situation. Defensor Fidei! He couldn't pray.

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3.

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But this peculiar feeling of—mental duplicity shall we call it?—this doubt of himself;-this struggle to sustain the clear bright assurance of his chosen convictions, was not the only strain upon Mr. Davis's serenity. Several other matters not directly connected with his literary work were also conspiring to disturb his abnormally sensitive mind.

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As he walked down Lower Regent Street from Picadilly Station towards his club, various discontents, new ones and old ones, threaded their way round and about each other, each rasping against him and eluding him, dodging down into the subconscious and giving place to another whenever he tried to pchallenge it. The day was grey and overcast and it gave him no help—was indeed definitely against him. He was inclined to think he would have been wiser to have put on his medium coat rather than his thin Burberry, and at the same time he found the air moist and stuffy.

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Chief among these accessory troubles was this, that for the first time in his life he was to become a father. It is an occasion few men face with absolute calm; it stirs up all sorts of neglected or unexplored regions of possibility in the mind. No psycho-analyst as yet has investigated the imaginative undercurrents in the mind of the expectant father. No one has attempted a review of the onset of parentage in the male. Here we must confine our attention strictly to the case of Mr. Joseph Davis. For some time he had been developing a curious vague perplexity about this wife of his, who was so soon to add the responsibilities and anxieties of fatherhood to his already febrile mental activities, and that expectation had greatly intensified this perplexity.

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Here again the subtle sensitiveness of the imaginative temperament came in. A literary man carries about with him in his head a collection of edged tools known as his Vocabulary. And sometimes he cuts himself. Two or three years ago 'enigmatical' had, so to speak, stuck up suddenly and caught him when he was thinking about his wife. And 'fey.' She was fifteen years younger than he was, he had married her when she was scarcely more than a girl, and yet, he had been compelled to realize, she was enigmatical, extremely enigmatical.

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To begin with he had loved her in a simple, straightforward, acquisitive way and she had seemed to love him. He had not thought about her very much; he had just loved her as a man loves a woman. Their early married life, subject to the obvious discretions of our time, had been natural and happy; she had learned to type for him and they had been inseparable and all that sort of thing. Then by imperceptible degrees things had seemed to change. His satisfaction in her clouded over. She had seemed to disentangle herself from him and draw herself together. More and more was he aware of a lack of response in her.

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And then came the memorable evening when she had remarked: 'I don't know whether I care for very much more of this sort of thing unless I am going to have a child.'

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This sort of thing! Roses, raptures, whispers, dusk, moonlight, nightingales, all the love poetry that ever was—this sort of thing! So that was it!

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'You are quite well off,' she said.

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As though that mattered… .

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There had been a certain amount of argument, in which delicacy had prevailed over explicitness, and then she had carried her point. He had made it plain to her that whatever reluctance he might have displayed at first was solely on her account and that now they were embarked together on a shining adventure. They were to make life 'more abundant.' Once the proposal was accepted his imagination seemed to bubble offspring. He buried 'this sort of thing' as deeply as he could under high-piled flower-beds of philoprogenitive sentiment; he tried his utmost to forget her strangely inhuman phrase.

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Yet after everything was settled, still his uneasiness deepened, still her detachment seemed to increase.

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It seemed to increase. But that was where another queer worry came now into his mind. Had she always had some or all of this disposition towards detachment, and had he failed to observe it hitherto? In the first bright months or so of their married life, when he had looked at her and she had looked at him their eyes had met upon a common purpose as if they were smacking hands together. But now it was as if her hand had become a phantom hand that his own hand went right through, and his gaze seemed always just to miss meeting her deep regard. Her dark eyes had become inaccessible. 'Unfathomable' the vocabulary threw up. She scrutinized him and revealed nothing. Husbands and wives ought to become more easy with each other, more familiar, as life goes on, but she was increasingly aloof.

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The majority of discontented husbands, the burden of comic literature, proverbial wisdom, testify to the terrors of a talkative wife, but indeed these terrors are nothing to those of a silent woman, a silent thoughtful woman. A scolding wife can say endless disconcerting things and she hits or misses, but a silent woman says everything.

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Always nowadays she seemed to be thinking him over. And his morbidly sensitive self-consciousness filled her silences with criticisms against which he had no defence.

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When he had married her, a young, dark, shy girl, he had radiated protective possession all over her. It would have seemed impossible then that he should ever feel—it is a strange word to use about a wife and as we use it here we use it in its most sublimated and attentuated sense, but the word is—fear. Latterly his uneasiness with his wife and about his wife had increased almost to the quality of that emotion.

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Of course he had always realized that there was something subtly unusual about her, even about her appearance. But at first he had found that simply attractive. She was neither big nor clumsy but she was broadly built; her brow was broad and her dark grey eyes were unusually wide apart; the corners of her full mouth drooped gravely and at times she had a way of moving that was, so to speak, absentminded, preoccupied. At first he had valued all this as 'distinction,' but later he had come rather to think of her as 'unusual.' She was far more unusual than the faint foreignness of her Scotch origin and the slow deliberation of her speech justified her in being.

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He had never liked her people, which was odd because he had hardly seen anything of them. She had come into his world, as it seemed at first, romantically. He had met her at a publisher's cocktail party, she had been invited there rather for her ambitions than her performance, and she had told him then that her people lived in the Outer Hebrides and that they opposed her wish to study and write. She had just spoken of them as 'people'. She had won scholarships at a Glasgow high school. She had got to the university and so worked her way to London in defiance of them. She had written poetry, she told him, and she wanted to see it printed.

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But London, she said, wasn't quite what she had expected it to be. London astonished, frightened, and stimulated her, and kept on seeming stranger and stranger. She was not growing accustomed to it. People were always saying and doing the most unaccountable things.

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'At times,' she said, 'I feel like a stray from another world. But then, you know, I felt very much the same when I was at home in the islands where I was born. Have you ever had that feeling? All you people here seem so sure of your world and of yourselves.'

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It was when she said this that the idea of guiding this quiet, unsure, and lovely young stranger to all the braveries of life entered the head of Mr. Joseph Davis. It was so exceptional to meet an intelligent young woman who seemed unsure of herself and who was willing to be taught and hadn't already, in an irrational hurry to begin, taken the braveries of life to herself in her own fashion. It was not so much a candid inviting white virginity as an elusive elfin one she had. Here, he thought, was something fine and unformed to mould and shape and write flourishes upon.

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He went about thinking of her more and more, with all those exploratory impulses aroused in him which constitute falling in love. He was soon completely in love with her.

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When he offered to read some of her verse, she said she didn't want it read, she just wanted to see it in print and read it herself. When at last he saw it he liked it. It was like a missionary's translations from the Chinese; mostly vivid little word pictures. From the point of view of publication and running the gauntlet of all these modern poets and reviewers who cut you up with one hand and cut you out with-the other, he did not think it likely to be successful. But it had nevertheless a curious simplicity, a curious directness and a faint wistful flavour.

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He learnt that she was living in a student's hostel in Bloomsbury, he established contacts with her and he was able to take her about very freely. Perhaps at one time he had thought simply of becoming her first lover, but she had an unobtrusive defensiveness that marriage was the only way to her.

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Two rawboned fishermen in bonnets and broadcloth suddenly appeared in London to 'take a look at him' when the marriage was mooted. They were the most astonishing and unexpected 'people' for her to produce. They had her dark colouring and dark grey eyes like hers, but otherwise they were singularly unlike her. Brawny they were. They had none of her manifest fineness and restraint.

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'You'll have to take great care of her,' they told him, 'for she's been the treasure of our eyes. She's better than we and we know it. Why we ever let her persuade us that she had to come on to London is more than we can explain, but the mischief's been done and you've got her.'

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'She's lovely. You're telling me that?' said Davis, and the elder brother, darkly reproachful, said: 'Aye. We're telling you.'

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They stayed in London until the wedding, and entertaining them was a little like making hay with seaweed. They seemed to keep on looking at him and passing Hebridean judgments on him. They were full of unspoken things.

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He would say things to them and they would say: 'Eh'—just 'Eh.' Not an interrogative 'Eh?' but an ambiguous acknowledgment.

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They got drunk in a dutiful, dubious, and melancholy way for the registry office, and the last he saw of them was on the platform at Victoria when he carried her off to show her the wonders of Paris. They were standing together grave and distrustful, not gesticulating nor waving good-bye but each holding up a great red hand as who should say: 'We're here.'

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And when at last the curve hid them and he pulled up the carriage window and turned to her to meet the love-light in her eyes she said to him: 'And now you are going to show me the real world and all those cities and lakes and mountains where at last we shall feel at home.'

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Only she never did seem to feel at home.

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She never talked about this family of hers to him, after the transit of these two samples, and she corresponded with them with an infrequent regularity. She never gave him any reason to suppose she cared very much for them. But the fact which presently became apparent, that, unlike him, she was a good sailor and loved wind and rough seas, seemed to link her to them rather than to him. Many husbands have objected to their wives' relations because they were too near, but he found he objected to hers because they were too remote. And also she loved mountains and crags and precipitous places. He didn't. They climbed the Matterhorn at great expense, he gave more trouble to the guides than she did, and at the summit she seemed to be pleased but still gravely looking for more.

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Once on holiday in Cornwall they had been basking together on the beach after lunch and suddenly her pose, as she sat thinking, reminded him of a picture he had seen somewhere of Undine, La Motte Fouques Undine, sweet and detached, looking across the far levels of the sea, lost in some unimaginable reverie. Undine too had had some uncouth and menacing brothers. That was when the fancy of her as a sort of changeling, as something ultra-terrestrial and not quite human first came to him. That was when 'fey' came out of the vocabulary.

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This Undine suggestion hung about for months. First he let this exaggeration of her faint unearthliness play mischievously in his mind, and then he tried to restrain and banish it. Sometimes he tried to persuade himself that every man's wife is really an Undine, but he could never make really convincing observations in that matter. Maybe, he thought, you never get near enough to any woman but your own wife to appreciate her remoteness.

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A multitude of possibly quite accidental divergences grouped themselves about that 'fey'.

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He spun the thread of that word's suggestion into a web about her. It swept aside the one worse alternative that conceivably she was just simple and lacking in aesthetic enterprise. At first that 'fey' was a fantastic exaggeration and then it became more and more an observation, an explanation for her undeniable detachment from so much that excited and stirred him, and from so much that he believed ought to excite and stir anybody. That struggle of his ideals with a dark underworld of doubts, which made it urgent for him to keep thinking, feeling, appreciating—like an urgent skater over thin ice and a cold abyss of disbelief—had no counterpart. She could keep still and remain content in her convictions, in something deep—whatever it was that she knew and did not communicate.

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There was no malice in her detachment from him. He could have understood malice better. He had seen mutual jealousy and mutual detraction often enough among his married friends. The better the artists the worse the lovers. He understood that fight for individual assertion which makes love a legendary unreality, a blend of fantasy and grossness, in the world of the intelligentsia. But this was not the assertion of an individuality; it was a complete indifference to his values. It was a foreignness—to the whole world.

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Whenever Mr. Davis had a slump in his vitality he realized this widening estrangement from his wife more acutely. The lower the ebb the intenser the realization. And this day his realization was exceptionally vivid …

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This very morning she had made a remark that stirred him to a protest he abandoned in despair. There was to be a big concert at the Pantechnicon Hall with Rodhammer conducting. He was enthusiastic for going. She did not want to go.

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He argued against her disinclination. 'You used to like music.'

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'But I have heard music, dearest.'

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'Heard music! My dear, what a queer way to put things!'

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She shook her head from side to side without speaking. There was a time when the self-assurance of her faint smile had seemed very lovely to him. Mona Lisa and all that, but now it irritated him with a sense of invincible and unapproachable opposition.

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'But you've only heard Rodhammer once before!'

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'Why should I want to hear Rodhammer again—a little better or not so good?'

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'But music!'

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'There's a limit to music,' she said.

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'A limit!'

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'I've a feeling that I've done with music. It was wonderful, charming, sustaining, all that music we went to hear—to begin with. I loved that as much as I've loved anything. But if one has taken music in—hasn't one taken it in?'

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'Taken it in! You mean—?' he tried.

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'I mean you don't always want to be sitting down to attend to it after you've heard—what there is to it. We aren't—professional.'

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Professional! When she did use words she used them in a very deadly fashion. 'I never tire of music,' he said.

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'But does the sort of music there is say anything—does it say anything fresh?'

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'It's eternally fresh.'

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'How?'

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'He made a hopeless gesture. 'But why have you become indifferent?'

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'But why are you still so enthusiastic?'

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'But don't you get—something wonderful? An exaltation? A world of absolute sensuous emotion?'

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'No—I did at first. A sort of exaltation. I agree. And still I like—rhythm. It's pleasant to hear music going on, but it's no longer something I want to listen to especially. Going to hear music in concerts seems to me like going to see pictures in galleries … Or reading anthologies… . Or looking over a collection of butterflies in a museum… . A time comes… .'

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'Then, in short, you won't go to the concert?'

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'I feel a little tired but I will go if you like.'

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'Oh! not like that,' he said and ended their talk.

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But he went over it again in his own mind and now he was going over it once more. He knew people to whom music meant much and people to whom music meant little, but to take up music as Mary had, in a spirit of glad discovery, and then to put it down again as one might put down an unimportant novel, distressed his mind. But that was how she seemed to deal with everything in life. Even with friendship, even with love, she had that same flash of interest, that rapid appreciation, and then she turned away. To what?

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He spoke aloud, addressing Lower Regent Street: 'You can't afford to give up music like that. You can't afford to give up art.'

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And what he did not say because he could not bring himself to say it, was: 'And how can you afford to give up love?'

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When the child comes, will she give up that?

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Or will she go on loving the child. Leaving me behind? My part played?

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The eternal going on! This complete instability of values! …

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Could it fail to distress a man who was in effect a professor of stable values?

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4.

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And here we must note another rather unusual element in the mélange of Mr. Davis's troubles, a queer little thing that would have mattered nothing to a less imaginative man, but which was to thread through all the train of thought upon which he was presently to embark. It was a very slender thread indeed, a matter so irrational and ridiculous that it seems almost unfair to him to mention it. And yet it certainly played a slight deflecting role in guiding him to the strange idea. It cannot therefore be ignored altogether.

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Since his school days he had had a secret detestation of his own Christian name. Facetious upper-school boys had made it plain that there was a shadow on it Neither in the Old Testament nor in the New, is the name of Joseph adorned with that halo of triumphant virility which is the desire of every young male. He had struggled to insist that he should always be called 'Jo.' But the mortifying realization that he was a 'Joseph' damped his private meditations.

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There was not the faintest circumstance to justify any marital uneasiness on his part. No one sane could have entertained a suspicion of his Mary's integrity—nor did he, in the foreground of his mind. And yet, he would have been happier under a different name.

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So it was.

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5.

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And here we must note another rather unusual element in the mélange of Mr. Davis's troubles, a queer little thing that would have mattered nothing to a less imaginative man, but which was to thread through all the train of thought upon which he was presently to embark. It was a very slender thread indeed, a matter so irrational and ridiculous that it seems almost unfair to him to mention it. And yet it certainly played a slight deflecting role in guiding him to the strange idea. It cannot therefore be ignored altogether.

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Since his school days he had had a secret detestation of his own Christian name. Facetious upper-school boys had made it plain that there was a shadow on it Neither in the Old Testament nor in the New, is the name of Joseph adorned with that halo of triumphant virility which is the desire of every young male. He had struggled to insist that he should always be called 'Jo.' But the mortifying realization that he was a 'Joseph' damped his private meditations.

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There was not the faintest circumstance to justify any marital uneasiness on his part. No one sane could have entertained a suspicion of his Mary's integrity—nor did he, in the foreground of his mind. And yet, he would have been happier under a different name.

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So it was.

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Chapter 2 Mr. Joseph Davis Learns about Cosmic Rays

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1.

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The Planetarium Club abounds in unexpected conversations. It has a core of scientific men who are mostly devotees of the exact sciences, grave, shy, precise men, but wrapped round them are layers of biologists, engineers, explorers, civil servants, patent lawyers, criminologists, writers, even an artist or so. Almost any subject may be started in the smoking-room where most of the talk goes on, but the feeling against chewed newspaper is strong. Mr. Davis, as he ascended the club steps, made an effort to throw off those vague shadows that oppressed his mind, and to brighten his bearing to the quality that may be reasonably expected of a temperamental optimist.

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But as he recrossed the hall from the vestiary to the dining-room he was still undecided whether he should sit at one of the small tables and go on with his state of uneasy deterioration, or take a place at one of the sociable boards. He elected for solitude, but repented as soon as his decision was made, and after his solitary lunch he made a real effort at sociability and joined a talking circle of a dozen men or more between the window and the fire, sitting down next to Foxfield, that hairy, untidy biologist, for whom he had a slightly condescending liking. The talk was rather under the stress of a new member, a parliamentary barrister, who might be almost anything in a few years' time and manifestly felt as much. This man had been elected before it was realized that he was slightly larger than any one else in the club and disposed to behave accordingly, and his conversational method was rather an elucidatory cross-examination than an original contribution to the interchanges.

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'Tell me,' he would say and even point a ringer. 'I don't know anything about these things. Tell me—'

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'Tell me,' except in the case of monarchs, heirs apparent, and presidents of the United States, is by the standards of the Planetarium atrocious conversational manners. But so far no one in the club had been able to get this point of view over to the new-comer: It would happen sooner or later but so far it had not happened. He was talking now with an air of making out some sort of case against modern physics and demonstrating how entirely more sensible and practical a mind which had passed through the ennobling exercises of Greats and a straightforward legal and political training could be.

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'Atoms and force were good enough for Lucretius and they were good enough for my stinks master when I was a boy. Then suddenly you have to disturb all that. There's wonderful discoveries, and the ak is full of electrons and neutrons and positons.'

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'Positrons,' a voice corrected.

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'It's all the same to us. Positrons. And photons and protons and deutrons. Alpha rays and Beta rays and Gamma rays and X rays and Y rays. And they fly about like solar systems and all the rest of it. And the dear old Universe that used to be fixed and stable begins to expand and contract—like God playing a concertina. Tell me—frankly. I suggest to you—it's a bluff. It's something out of nothing. It's just a way of selling us mystery bottles with scientific labels. I ask you.'

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He paused with the air of a man who has put a poser.

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A small, elderly, but still acutely acid old gentleman was sitting deep in one of the armchairs. The finger had not challenged him, but now he put out a lean hand and spoke with a thin penetrating voice, like a rapier, with the faint glint of a Scotch accent along the edge.

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'You say Tell me—and Tell me. Will you have the grace to listen while I tell ye? And not interrupt?'

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And when the slightly outsize member made as if he had something further to say, the old gentleman just raised his hand and said: 'No. Listen, I tell ye, and told you shall be.'

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The rising man, just faintly abashed, assumed an attitude of sceptical and slightly impatient intelligence, looking round the group for support in what he evidently imagined was going to be a duel of wits. Just for a moment he imagined that. And then suddenly he felt like facing twelve implacably hostile jurymen and the first lesson of the Planetarium Club entered into his soul. Not to bounce.

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Quietly and unobtrusively he allowed himself to lapse into the pose of the modest best boy in the class who knows that he still has much to learn and who cannot command any one to tell him but is glad to be told.

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'These things boil down,' said the old gentleman. 'I've lectured about them for years. And followed the changes. When one gets old one has to be concise and it's fortunate I've had some practice in packing my statements. Still I'll have to take five minutes. I'll do all I can for you. Those Oxford teachers of yours—for it's Oxford you come from—probably left your mathematical philosophy in a worst state than they found it when you came up from your English public school—if indeed your formula-dodging schoolmasters gave you any mathematical understanding at all even there—so I may not be able to explain everything to you. Some bits I'll just have to tell you—as you put it. But it's really quite simple and credible stuff they've made of it in the last twenty-five years, Rutherford and Bragg and Niels Bohr and the rest of those fellows, and the younger people find no difficulty about it at all.'

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And with that and a galling air of careful simplification he proceeded to unfold a compact modern view of space and time and the movements of things therein. 'Don't ask me what electricity is,' he said, 'and I'll tell you everything else as we have it up to date. It's none so complicated as you think and there's never a contradiction.'

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And very neatly he took his nucleus, twisted up his atoms with electrons and neutrons round the central proton, and sent them eddying into a world of throbbing photons. Then he ran his hand along the sixty-odd octaves of the spectrum from the hundred-yard electro-magnetic undulations beyond the longest radio length through heat rays and light rays to X rays and Gamma rays, smacked a few atoms together, shot them through with helium atoms, and described the results, and by way of epilogue gave a lucid word to those flying sub-atomies, the cosmic rays.

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'After all, it's none so confused,' he said, and indeed the pictures that arose as one listened to his slightly remonstrating, very persuasive Scotch intonation had the music of ripples and wavelets, of dancing reflections upon the side of a ship, of the concentric colour rings of films on water, of every sort of pleasant patterning and logical ornamentation. He made dead matter dance and circle, set to partners, interfere, shimmer, glow, become iridescent and mysteriously endowed with energy. The atoms of our fathers seemed by contrast like a game of marbles abandoned in a corner of a muddy playground on a wet day. He even had a cautious word for the young neutrinos, the latest aspirants to his dance in the atomic assembly-rooms. The one or two men who were experts in the subject listened, pleased to hear the A B C of their subject so lucidly delivered, and the rest were glad to check up their vague impressions of these fluctuating modern conceptions.

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'And where do we come in?' asked someone. 'Where is thought and the soul in all this?'

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'Just a film, just a thin zone of reflection halfway in the scale of size between those electrons and the stars,'

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2.

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Davis followed that compact discourse in a mood of unusual self-forgetfulness. It was, he found, as refreshing as good drink, and as little likely to linger in the system. And even the new member betrayed a certain humility in his attention,

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But he still felt it was his duty to himself to talk.

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'Those cosmic rays of yours,' he said. 'They are the most difficult part of your story. They aren't radiations. They aren't protons. What are they? They go sleeting through the universe incessantly, day and night, going from nowhere to nowhere. For the life of me I find that hard to imagine.'

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'They must come from somewhere,' said a quiet little man with an air of producing a very special contribution to the discussion.

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'We note their existence,' said the old gentleman. 'We watch them but we draw no premature conclusions. They are infinitesimal particles flying at an inconceivable velocity. They come from all directions of outer space. And that's as much as we know about them. If I put out my finger like that for a second or so, there's only just a dozen or so gone through it in a second. And no harm done. Which is just as well. There's more up above us in the outer atmosphere. But fortunately they get reflected and absorbed. You know we have a sort of filtering halo about the earth, a sort of cloak of electrons, which keeps off any excess of these radiations.'

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'That Heaviside layer,' a stout rufous man, who had apparently been asleep, interpolated.

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'And what may that be?' asked the barrister.

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'It's a beautiful sample of scientific terminology,' said the stout rufous man still somnolently. 'This Heaviside layer, so far as I can understand it, is called so, because firstly it isn't heavy, secondly it hasn't any side, and thirdly it is almost as much a layer as—as a rheumatic chill or a glow of indignation. Go on, Professor.'

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His eyes, which had been partly open, closed again.

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'You said,' said the examining barrister, 'that fortunately they are kept off. Why—fortunately? May I ask?'

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'My thankfulness may have been a little unwarranted,' said the old gentleman. 'But these cosmic rays have a lot of energy, considering their size. They knock atoms about when they hit them. And we and our belongings are made of atoms. A lot of them, a great lot of them, a real douche of cosmic rays, might cause all sorts of tissue diseases, blow up mines, strike the matches in our pockets. But as it is they don't often hit even one atom—quantitatively they're more ineffective even than that infinitesimal quantity of radiation that is always coming up from the radium in the earth; and so Nature is able to clean up any little speck of mess that occurs.'

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'Not always,' said Foxfield suddenly.

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'I've heard of that idea you're alluding to, Mr. Foxfield,' said the old gentleman. 'You mean that idea about the chromosomes.'

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'Now tell me,' said the barrister, relapsing for a moment. 'I've heard somewhere before of this idea you're speaking of. I'm told these cosmic rays affect—what is it you call them?—mutations.'

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'I have no doubt of it,' said Foxfield.

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'You'll find no physicist to encourage you,' said the old gentleman.

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'Or contradict me,' said Foxfield.

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'Aye, aye,' said the old gentleman cheerfully. 'It's a case of not proven.'

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'But what is this?' asked Davis. 'Do you mean that these—these cosmic rays may affect heredity—inheritance?'

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'I should be inclined to say they must,' said Foxfield.

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'But why them in particular?' asked the barrister.

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'Because we have eliminated almost every other possible cause for changes in the chromosomes,'

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'It's a most extraordinary thing,' said the rufous man, slowly waking up and passing by swift stages from sleepiness to a bright alertness.

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'The chromosomes,' said Foxfield, 'the germinal elements, have very complicated and enormous molecules. They are rather elaborately protected from most types of disturbance. They have a sort of independence of the parent body. They go their way alone.'

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'Transmission of acquired characteristics strictly forbidden,' someone interjected.

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'It seems to be. But the X rays, the Gamma rays, and particularly these cosmic rays can get through, and so, I reason, they must get through—to start something fresh. Since something fresh is always being started.'

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And now it was Foxfield's turn to answer intelligent questions and give a brief lecture.

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He summarized the new realizations of the past twenty-five years about mutations and survival almost as expertly as the old professor had elucidated his atoms. He showed how the changing of species bit by bit, by imperceptible gradations, which the early Darwinians had stressed, had given place in modern evolutionary theory to a realization of the frequency of extensive simultaneous sports and mutations. And there was nothing in the circumstances of an animal species which could explain these sports and mutations. And so it was that Foxfield was compelled to think they were produced by some penetrating exterior force.

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'But why not Providence?' asked the quiet man.

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'Because the vast majority of these mutations are aimless and useless,' said Foxfield.

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'And so, having eliminated everything else,' said the barrister, 'you lay the burden of change and mutation—and in fact all the responsibility for evolution—on those little cosmic rays! Countless myriads fly by and miss. Then one hits—Ping! Ping!—and we get a double-headed calf or a superman.'

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'What an unsettled universe it is!' said someone.

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3.

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And then suddenly the rufous man was touched by fantasy. His sleepiness had fallen from him altogether. He sat up brightly now. 'Look here!' he said. 'I've got an idea! Suppose—'

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He paused. He produced that 'suppose' like a juicy fruit and hovered with his hand in the air for a voluptuous moment before he squeezed the juice from it.

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'Suppose these cosmic rays come from Mars!'

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'They come, I tell ye, from every direction,' said the old professor.

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'Including Mars. Yes, Mars, that wizened elder brother of the planet Earth. Mars, where intelligent life has gone far beyond anything this planet has ever known. Mars, the planet which is being frozen out, exhausted, done for. Some of you may have read a book called The War of the Worlds—I forget who wrote it—Jules Verne, Conan Doyle, one of those fellows. But it told how the Martians invaded the world, wanted to colonize it, and exterminate mankind. Hopeless attempt! They couldn't stand the different atmospheric pressure, they couldn't stand the difference in gravitation; bacteria finished them up. Hopeless from the start. The only impossible thing in the story was to imagine that the Martians would be fools enough to try anything of the sort. But—'

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He held up his hand and wagged his fingers with pleasure at his idea.

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'Suppose they say up there: "Let's start varying and modifying life on the earth. Let's change it. Let's get at the human character and the human brain and make it Martian-minded. Let's stop having children on this rusty little old planet of ours, and let's change men until they become in effect our children. Let's get spiritual children there." D'you see? Martian minds in seasoned terrestrial bodies.'

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'And so they start firing away at us with these cosmic rays!'

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'And presently,' said the rufous man, almost gobbling with the excitement of his idea, 'presently when they have got the world Martianized—'

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'I never heard such nonsense,' said the old professor and got up to go away. 'I tell ye these cosmic rays come from every direction.'

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'And why shouldn't they use a sort of shrapnel?' said the rufous man to his retreating back. 'Shells full of these cosmic rays, so to speak, with a back-lash. Nothing impossible in that, is there?'

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The old professor's back made no reply. And yet it had a certain eloquence.

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'They'd probably begin with wild mutations,' somebody suggested after a pause; 'and then get more accurate.'

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'It may have been going on for a long time,' said the quiet man, helpful as ever.

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'You're assuming of course that they know a lot more about us than we know about them,' said the rising barrister.

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'And isn't that easily possible?' the rufous man countered. 'Mars is the older planet. Far beyond us along the line of evolution. What we know is nothing to what they must know. They may be as able to look through us as we are to take a microscope and look through an amoeba. And when they have got the world Martianized, when they've started a race here with minds like their own and yet with bodies fit for earth, when they have practically interbred with us and ousted our strain, then they'll begin to send along their treasures, their apparatus—grafting their life on ours. Making men into their heirs and their continuations. Eh? Am I talking nonsense, Foxfield? Am I talking nonsense?'

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'The jokes of today may become the facts of tomorrow,' said Foxfield. 'Nonsense pro tem, let us say.'

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'I'm beginning to believe my own story,' said the rufous man. 'With your endorsement. It's wonderful.'

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'But tell me,' said the lawyer, also a little excited by this strange idea, 'is there any evidence in confirmation? Any evidence at all? For example—has there been any increase of freaks and monsters in the world in the last few years?'

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'It's only recently that there has been any attempt to give a statistical account of abnormalities and mutations,' said Foxfield. 'Monstrosities are hushed up—human monstrosities particularly. Even animal-breeders have a sort of shame about them, and wild creatures kill strange offspring instinctively. Every living creature seems to want to breed true. But from the fruitfly and plants and so on we know there is an amount of variation going on—.much larger than everyday people imagine.'

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'Mostly unfavourable variation though?' asked the barrister.

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'Ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent,' said Foxfield. 'With no survival value at all. Chance. Like the wildest experimenting… .'

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4.

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Now this was the last kind of stuff to which an anxious prospective parent on the verge of neurasthenia ought to have listened.

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And yet is it not out of accidents and disasters and fantastic twists of the mind that the greatest discoveries of science and the profoundest revelation of nature's processes have come? Things long unsuspected may be laid bare by a jest. The jokes of today may become the facts of tomorrow, even as Foxfield had said.

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As Mr. Joseph Davis walked home from the Planetarium Club he seemed to hear and see those cosmic rays, flashing like tracer bullets, singing like arrows, gleaming and vanishing like falling stars, through the world about him. You might wrap yourself from them, the old professor had remarked, in solid lead, and still they got through to you.

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Chapter 3 Mr. Joseph Davis Wrestles with an Incredible Idea

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1.

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It is an open question how freely an obstetrician should talk to the husband of his patient. Dr. Holdman Stedding erred perhaps on the communicative side. It may be he should have realized more promptly that Mr. Joseph Davis was troubled in his imagination, and he should have exercised more care than he did in avoiding topics that might intensify his imaginative disturbance. Yet it may be pleaded in extenuation that it was Mr. Davis who started the subject of these mysterious extra-terrestrial radiations and that it was Dr. Holdman Stedding who was taken by surprise with a novel idea. He too had his imaginative side. He liked novel ideas and there was just that streak of scientific curiosity and communicativeness in him which impairs discretion.

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He was a stout, large-faced, warmish-blond man, always a little out of breath and always with a faint flavour of surprise in his expression. And he liked to be made to laugh. His mouth was always just a little open, as if ready to laugh. But he knew his work marvellously well; he had strong and skilful hands and he never got flurried.

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Davis had called on him before. He had wanted to have an exact account of the health of his wife, Was she strong enough to bear a child? She was as strong, said Dr. Holdman Stedding, 'as a young pony.'

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The way in which Davis beat about that idea that things were not quite right with his wife gave the good doctor a queer feeling that a less reassuring reply would have been more acceptable. For obscure reasons—sub-reasons rather—it seemed that Davis did not want this child.

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Like every practising obstetrician Dr. Holdman Stedding knew all the faint intimations of a tentative to abortion, and knew how to nip any such suggestion in the bud. Panic before fatherhood is a more frequent thing than the lay mind realizes. It is constantly peeping out in these consultations. Davis, if such had been his disposition, had departed unsatisfied. But here he was again.

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'I suppose everything is going all right with Mary?' he asked, advancing uneasily into the consulting-room.

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'Couldn't be better.'

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'You made a second examination?'

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'At your request. It was unnecessary.'

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'There is nothing unusual… .?' Mr. Davis rephrased his question. 'The child, the embryo, so far as you can ascertain, is not different in any way from any other child at the same stage?'

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'It is coming on well. There is absolutely no ground for worry.'

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'And the mother—physically and mentally. You are sure she can stand this? Because you know, say what you like, she is not a normal woman.'

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'Do sit down,' said the doctor, recapturing the hearth-rug by putting his visitor into a chair, and then standing over him. 'Don't you think, Mr. Davis, that you are—just a trifle fanciful about your wife?'

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'Well,' said Davis, sticking to his point, 'is she normal?'

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Few women in her condition remain as sane and healthy as she is. If that is abnormal. Her mind like her body is as sound as a bell.'

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'You don't think a woman can be too sane? I confess, Dr. Stedding, I don't always understand my wife. There is a sort of hard scepticism in her mind … You don't think a woman can be too intelligent to make a good mother?'

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'Really, Mr. Davis! What's fretting your mind? With her clearheadedness and your literary genius your child may be something quite outstanding.'

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'And that is what bothers me. The fact of it is, Doctor, I've been hearing talk lately… . I don't know if you know Foxfield and his work… . I take a scientific interest in this as well as a personal one… . The point is—'

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2.

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He kept the doctor waiting for a moment.

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'The point is, do you, with your experience, think that latterly—how shall I put it?—exceptional children have become rather more frequent than they used to be?'

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'Exceptional? Gifted?'

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'Yes, gifted. In some cases perhaps. And also—what shall I say?—abnormalities?'

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'H'm!' said the doctor. He was interested. He attempted a brief survey of his experience. 'There are some rather surprising children and youngsters about. But I suppose something of that sort has always been going on.'

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'To the same extent?' pressed Davis. 'To the same extent?'

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'Possibly not. It is very hard to say. Naturally in this part of London and with a clientele like mine, we have exceptional parents. My impression, my unchecked and uncontrolled impression, is that, in the world I know, maternal mortality is extremely low and the infants are—bright is the word. Some with biggish heads. But anything in the way—of out-of-the-way novelties, no. If you are worrying about monstrosities—you need not worry. And exceptionally bright children are nothing to worry about. The Caesarean operation is probably more frequent nowadays… . That may be due rather to improved gynaecology than to any increase in mutations… .'

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Pause.

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'I would like to talk to you rather fantastically,' said Davis abruptly. 'It's not only my wife I am thinking about. Don't think I'm mad in what I am saying to you, but just think I am letting my imagination out for a romp.'

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'Nothing better,' said Dr. Holdman Stedding, who like most medical practitioners nowadays had a disposition towards a rather amateurish psycho-analysis. 'Say what you like. Let it rip.'

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'Well,' said Mr. Davis, and hesitated at the strangeness and difficulty of the ideas he had to explain. 'Biologists—I was talking to Foxfield the other day—biologists say that when a species comes to a difficult phase in its struggle for existence—and I suppose no one can say that is not fairly true of the human situation nowadays—there is an increased disposition to vary. There is—how did Foxfield put it?—for one thing, there is less insistence on the normal. Less insistence on the normal. It is as if the species began to try round and feel for new possibilities.'

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'Ye-es,' said the doctor, with non-committal encouragement in his tone.

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'And as if it became more capable of accepting abnormalities and weaving them into its destinies.'

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'Yes,' said the doctor, weighing the proposition. 'That is in accordance with current ideas.'

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'As an industrious student of history,' began Mr. Davis. 'You know I have written one or two books?'

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'Who does not? My two nephews got your Alexander, or Youth the Conqueror and your Story of the Spanish Main as prizes last term, and I can assure you I read them myself with great delight.'

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'Well. It seems to me that for ages human life has been playing much the same tune with variations—but much the same tune. What we call human nature. The general behaviour, the normal system of reactions, has been the same. The old, old story. Abnormal people have been kept in their places. You don't think, Doctor, that that uniformity of human experience is going to be disturbed?'

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'I wish you would explain a little more.'

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'Suppose there are—Martians.'

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'Well.'

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'Suppose there are beings, real material beings like ourselves, in another planet, but far wiser, more intelligent, much more highly developed. Suppose they are able to see us and know about us—as we know about the creatures under a microscope, which have no suspicion of us… . Mind you, this isn't my idea. I'm only repeating something I heard in the club. But suppose that in some way these older, wiser, greater, and better organized intelligences are able to influence human life.'

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'How?'

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'They may have tried all sorts of ways. They may have been experimenting for ages. Much as we might run a reagent into a microscope slide. The amoebae and so on would have no idea… .'

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'If you are thinking of anything like inter-planetary telepathy, anything of that sort, I'm not with you. Even between closely similar minds, between identical twins for example, I doubt if such a thing is possible… . I detest telepathy.'

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'This is quite a different idea.'

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'Well?'

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'Suppose that for the last few thousand years they have been experimenting in human genetics. Suppose they have been trying to alter mankind in some way, through the human genes.'

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'But how?'

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'You have heard of cosmic rays, Doctor?'

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The doctor took it in with some deliberation. 'It is a quite fantastic idea,' he said after a pause.

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'But neither impossible nor incredible.'

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'Some things one puts outside the range of practical possibility.'

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'And some things refuse to be put outside the range of practical possibility.'

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'But you don't mean to tell me you believe—?'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'No. But I face a possibility with an open mind.'

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'Which is?'

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'That these Martians—'

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'But we don't know there are any Martians!'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'We don't know that there aren't.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'No.'

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'Quite possibly these rays do not come from Mars—more probably than not. But—let us call the senders—'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Senders?'

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'Well, whatever originates them. Let us call them Martians—just to avoid inventing a new name—'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Very well. And your suggestion is—?'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'That these Martians have been firing away with increasing accuracy and effectiveness at our chromosomes—perhaps for long ages. That is the story, the fancy if you like, that I want in some way to put to the test. Every now and then in history, strange exceptional figures have appeared, Confucius, Buddha; men with strange memories, men with uncanny mathematical gifts, men with unaccountable intuitions. Mostly they have been persons in advance of their times, as we say, and out of step with their times… . Do you see what I am driving at, Doctor?'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'But this is the purest fantasy!'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Or the realization of a fantastic fact.'

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'But—!'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

3.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

Dr. Holdman Stedding wavered in his mind. Ought he to let this talk run on or close down on it forthwith?

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At least half the disordered minds of the present time, he reflected, develop delusions about radiations. That kind of fancy has largely replaced those spiritual visions and inner voices which supplied the demented with crazy interpretations of their perplexities in the past. It was dangerous stuff, and the mind of Davis, to say the least of it, was very delicately poised. And yet there was something faintly plausible—a sort of fairy-tale plausibility—about this idea that caught the unprofessional elements of the doctor's imagination. He went on taking the idea seriously.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'What sort of confirmation is possible?' he considered.

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'That is where the puzzle comes in. That is why I am consulting you.'

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'You think that if one attempted some sort of examination of human births, past and present—it would of course be very hard to get any adequate records about this sort of thing—one might be able to detect—?'

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'That we are being played upon.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'But you don't believe—?'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Not a bit of it. Oh, no! I didn't come here to be certified. I am advancing a certain hypothesis. I am being purely scientific in my method. I advance a provisional theory that a certain thing is going on. And, mind you, if anything of the sort is going on, it is of great—of supreme importance to our race. And having made our trial assumption, we try and work out what would be some of the logical consequences of this process of extra-terrestrial influence, if my theory proves to hold good. Is it possible to detect non-human characteristics, superhuman characteristics perhaps, in some of the children born nowadays, and are these non-human characteristics on the increase? Are there people—what shall I call them?—fey people about? People as sane as you and I and yet strange? We can try them with special intelligence tests perhaps. We can go into the reports of educational institutions. So far I have not planned the lay-out of this investigation. It is all quite new in my mind. But isn't it a legitimate inquiry? I ask you.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'You will need genius for that lay-out.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Every original research needs that. But my theory I think is plain. My theory is that new influences are being brought to bear on human reproduction. For the purposes of our research I call the source of these influences—Martians. If my suspicions are confirmed, these Martians—for purposes at which we can only guess—are thrusting mutations upon us. They are planning human mutations. So that presently our very children may not prove to be our own!'

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As Mr. Davis said these last words, a full realization of the indiscretion of this talk dawned upon Dr. Holdman Stedding.

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'But that is going too far!' he cried. 'That is going much too far. We are talking—we are amusing ourselves—with pseudo-scientific nonsense.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

Mr. Davis perceived quite clearly whal was in his interlocutor's mind. 'It is too late, Doctor, to say that to me. This notion has bitten me. I mean to devote myself to this investigation; I feel called to it; and I want you to interest yourself in it also. If there is one chance in a million of this suspicion being true, then it demands attention. Even on a chance so bare as that we ought to get watchers and searchers, planetary coast-guards, so to speak, at work. We have to specify and measure and determine the nature of this inflow and herd it back upon itself before it is too late.'

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'H'm,' said Dr. Holdman Stedding, regarding his queer visitor with an expression of infinite perplexity.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'I am under no delusions,' said Mr. Davis. 'I agree I am talking about something almost absolutely improbable. Let me make it clear to you that I am perfectly clear upon that. I am skirting the giddy edge of utter impossibility. Well and good. But sometimes there are intuitions. How many discoveries have flashed forth at first as the wildest of surmises? It may be circumstances have conspired to point my mind in a certain direction. Never mind about that. I myself do not feel that this is an impossibility. Just simply that—not an absolute impossibility. No more. That is where I stand.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

Chapter 4 Dr. Holdman Stedding Is Infected with the Idea

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

1.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

Dr. Holdman Stedding lay awake that night thinking about the state of mind of Mr. Davis and about the queer idea of a genetic invasion of Martian qualities that he had propounded. There was something provocative about the idea; something that made his intelligence bristle defensively. 'Pure balderdash!' he said aloud, but as a matter of fact what made it so irritating was that it was not pure balderdash. There was an attenuated but not unbreakable thread of silly plausibility about the suggestion that prevented him from throwing it altogether out of his mind. He threw words like 'balderdash' at it as one might throw stones at a dog that persists in following one, and presently there was the damned thing back again.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'If it should chance that something of the sort was going on… .'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

He found himself asking himself whether there was any sort of evidence that some new type or perhaps even new types of human being were appearing in the world. Can there be such things as Martianized minds? 'Silly phrase,' he said. 'But somehow a contagious phrase.'

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He ran his mind over its collection of facts about the subject. He knew most of what was known and he realized that, for the purpose of getting a conclusive answer, it amounted to hardly anything at all. He reviewed the question methodically. The most confident statements, he reflected, are made that man has not changed since Neolithic times, that he has degenerated since the days of Pericles, that he is larger or smaller, healthier, less healthy, than his ancestors, that he has become finer and subtler or anything else that suits the private convictions, stated or implicit, of the 'authority' who flings out this sort of stuff to the public. When you came to think it oyer as he was doing, it was all without exception opinionated rubbish. No one has yet devised the means of getting the confused and irregular records available into any sort of order. No one has been able to do that work. People like J. B. S. Haldane and suchlike pioneer biologists were trying to form a research society now. Even the men most in contact with the facts have nothing better than 'impressions' and 'persuasions', and some, thought Dr. Holdman Stedding with righteous self-applause, know that that is so, and some do not let their prejudices rip. Dr. Holdman Stedding's private and unproven 'impression' was just the impression most favourable to Mr. Davis's wild surmise. His unproven belief was that a considerable change in the human mind was going on. He thought that heavy and clumsy types were not so abundant in the population as they used to be and that certain new mental types were on the increase.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'But what has that to do with Martians and cosmic rays?' his common sense protested, and his common sense answered: 'Nothing.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

After which he continued to pursue the subject.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

2.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

Such discursive nocturnal meditations as Dr. Holdman Stedding was now committed to, combine the advantage that they cover a wide ground and find the most diverse evidence in their excursions, with the disadvantage that they sometimes lose their way altogether and never return to the main issue. For a time the doctor's train of thought was in danger of the latter fate. He wandered into a labyrinth of possibility about the peculiar scepticism of the contemporary mind and the perplexing obduracies and wilfulnesses of so many of the rising generation. He knew more about the ideas of his hospital students than most of his colleagues, and sometimes they filled him with hope and sometimes they terrified him. Like all youth since our race began, most of them were sheep and went whither they were told or led, but for all that it was quite conceivable that the proportion of independent and wilful minds was higher than it had ever been before.

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The stiff troublesome fellows were the interesting ones.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

He passed to the marked increase of effctive medical research and from that to the general inventiveness of our age. Inventiveness had never been so manifest as it was today. For more than a century it had been increasing. Directly you said a thing could not possibly be done, there it was—done. Yet so far no one had suggested that this must be due to the release of new mental types. It might be.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

He felt that he would like to have another talk with Davis about the whole matter. Where had Davis got his evidently very strong belief that there were new and strange types appearing in the world? Could he know of anything that a leading obstetrician of wide scientific reading was not likely to know? The trouble about talking to Davis was the doctor's persuasion—possibly an exaggerated one—that mentally he was not too safely balanced. It would be unwise to 'encourage' him, if he was in fact drifting towards a delusion. And then abruptly Dr. Holdman Stedding remembered something.

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'His wife!'

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Several times Davis had practically asserted that his wife was strange, odd, exceptional. Dr. Holdman Stedding tried to recall the exact words but he found he could not do so. But that manifest disturbance at the advent of a child was bound up with that.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'If he's beginning to think his wife is one of these Martianized people … ! I wonder what a fellow of that sort might not do… . What was it he said? Something about our very children not proving to be our own?'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

Dr. Holdman Stedding spent some time that night trying to recall every particular he could of both these people. She was very quiet in her manner, observant, sane. If she was exceptional mentally it was because she was exceptionally sane. She moved easily and gracefully, as one does who has no conflicting nervous impulses. She did so even in her present condition; she was being one of the calmest and most competent patients he had ever known. 'If she's Martianized,' reflected the doctor, 'then the sooner we all get Martianized the better.'

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But then, he considered, he had not seen her a dozen times altogether and there might be qualities in her of which he knew nothing, to account for her husband's attitude, for that faintly distrustful insecurity about her.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

The doctor speculated about the relations of the Davis couple for a while. He liked her and he found something slightly antipathetic about her husband. The man's quick, incalculable, and ill-adjusted mental movements made him uncomfortable. No doubt his literary gifts were considerable, but like so many of these literary people he had much more control over himself upon paper than in real life. He must be a great trial to her and she ought to be protected, now at any rate, from his possible eccentricities. The doctor felt that something ought to be done about it, and began thinking of possible things that might or might not be done, until it occurred to him that it was through this sort of breach in impartiality that unprofessional conduct may enter into the life of a practitioner.

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3.

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In the morning he wrote a very carefully considered letter to Davis which he marked 'Private' and addressed to the Planetarium Club.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

It was a long and repetitious letter. It beat about the bush too much to be quoted in full here, but the gist of it was a warning not to give way to a 'fantasy-suggestion'. 'These little imaginative ideas one takes into one's mind are like those insidious creatures the medieval doctors used to talk about, little things that seem nothing at all, that leap into your mouth before you know where you are and grow into monsters inside your brain and devour your sanity.' No human mind, the doctor declared, was sufficiently balanced as yet to resist the disturbance of a too persistently cherished idea. That was why nearly everyone who investigated 'psychic phenomena' or 'telepathy' or 'astrology' or 'chiromancy' or the tarot cards presently began to find there was 'something in it'. Mr. Davis was to think no more about it, distract his mind, take up chess, play golf on new courses, before this obsession really gripped his mind. Tou are standing on the brink of a long mental slide at the bottom of which is delusional insanity. I write plainly to you, because you are still a perfectly sane & man,'

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4.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

He knows—he knows as well as I do,' said Mr. Joseph Davis. 'But he's afraid to go on with it… .

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'I want to go on with it. But how I am to do that I don't know. Watch… . And meanwhile these cosmic rays fly noiselessly about me—the arrows of the Martians—and by a birth here and a birth there—humanity undergoes—dehumanization,'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

Chapter 5 Professor Ernest Keppel Takes up the Idea in his Own Peculiar Fashion

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1.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

Now Dr. Holdman Stedding had a great friend and crony, a bachelor like himself and a queer imaginative talker, Professor Ernest Keppel. He was nominally professor of philosophy, but latterly he had engaged more and more in psycho-therapy. He was accused of psychologizing his philosophy away into a descriptive science and he was a frequent and formidable controversialist, more often in hot water than not.

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He was a dark, scarred, halting man. He had been scarred by the explosion of a hidden mine in the German trenches during the September advance in 1918. The scar ran as a dark red suture from the middle of his forehead across the left brow, where an overhanging exostosis thrust his eye into a deep and sinister cavern. Moreover, the explosion had stiffened the joint of his forearm, injured his pelvis, and left him lame. Before that he must have been very animated and attractive indeed. But his mutilation had left a curious bitterness in his nature. He understood why he was bitter; he did his best not to be bitter, but taking thought about it could not make him sweet. He was over-sensitive to the effect of his scar when he met new people; his incurable delusion that he was repulsive made him abrupt and rude, more particularly with women, and perhaps he exaggerated the delights of the normal experiences from which he felt he was shut off. He was prosperous and he lived well, and his energy and persistence in research and speculation were making a great reputation for him.

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The doctor found his company extremely stimulating. He was accustomed to bring new ideas to him and toast them, so to speak, in front of his glowing mind. Indeed he hardly ever took an idea to himself and assimilated it until he had warmed it up first before Professor Keppel. And now accordingly he took advantage of a lunch engagement to bring up the matter of the Martians. They often arranged by telephone to lunch together, because Keppel's place was so much nearer than clubland.

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'I was talking to a lunatic yesterday,' said the doctor, 'and he broached a most remarkable idea.'

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He stretched Mr. Davis's alleged discovery in a tone of appreciative scepticism as lunch went on.

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'It's nonsense,' he concluded.

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'It's nonsense,' Professor Keppel agreed. 'But—'

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'Exactly! But—'

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'But—' repeated Keppel and waved the hand of his inferior arm stifflly, while his trim parlourmaid stood at his elbow with the savoury.

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A certain brightness appeared in his overhung eye. His expression became profound.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

Dr. Holdman Stedding waited.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'The interesting point,' said Professor Keppel, helping himself to his Gruyere a la Roi Alphonse, 'the interesting point is, as you say, that we do in fact know nothing about what human modification may be going on at the present time. Nothing. Demographic science has hardly begun to be a precise science—much less an exact science. Our social statistics are extravagently clumsy. (A) We don't know what to count or measure and (B) we haven't an idea how to measure it. It is quite possible that new human types may be appearing in the world, or that once rare types may be increasing in number relatively. More geniuses—more aberrant gifts. And the queer thing is that, when this lunatic comes to you and starts this idea in your head, you don't say Pish or Tush and just turn it down; you begin to have a vague sense that somehow you have felt something—you hardly know what.'

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'That's it.'

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'And when you bring it to me (Do try this savoury. Don't pass it. I got the recipe from Martinez at that Spanish restaurant in Swallow Street) I begin to have the same feeling.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

2.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'One's imagination wants to play with it. It's as attractive as a hare's foot to a kitten. Suppose, Keppel, suppose—for the sake of a talk—there are Martians.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Let's suppose it. I'm more than willing.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'What sort of minds would they have and what would they think of our minds and what might they not try to make of them?'

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'Regarded as an exercise in speculative general psychology? That's attractive.'

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'As a speculative exercise then.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Exactly. You know that man Olaf Stapledon has already tried something of the sort in a book called Last and First Men. Some day we shall certainly have to come to a general psychology independent of the human type, just as now these young men in the Society of Experimental Biology are getting away from the highly specialized peculiarities of human physiology towards a general physiological science. Now away there in Mars, as any astronomer will tell you, there are all the conditions necessary for a sort of life similar, if not identically similar, to life upon earth, the same elements—air, water, a temperature range not widely different. The probabilities are in favour of there having been a parallel—a roughly parallel evolution. Parallel but in some ways different. The gravitational energy, atmospheric pressure, and suchlike things are different and that would mean differences in lightness, vigour, and size. Martian plants and animals would probably run much bigger. Much bigger.'

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'I forget the relative masses of the two planets,' said the doctor.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'I forget too. Roughly it's something like eight to one—perhaps a bit more. So the Martian if he had a human form would be twice as tall and eight times our weight. A bigger, longer-lived creature. Assuming—

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'No. It's not wild assumption. The odds are in favour that there are or have been growths, detachments, moving feeling things, in existence on that planet. This is bold speculation, Holdman Stedding, I admit, but it isn't extravaganza.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Go on. But you wouldn't dare to talk to your students like this.'

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'Possibly not. How far would the evolution of life, if it had an independent start elsewhere under slightly but not essentially different conditions, run parallel to the evolution of life on earth?'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'The same tune, I suppose, with variations.'.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'It is difficult to imagine anything else. There would be plants—I think green plants—and animals. The animals would run about as individuals and have senses, something like ours—perhaps very like ours. They might see more colours than we do, for example, have a longer or shorter range of sound, subtler feelers in the place of our hands. Probably Nature has tried out all the possible senses on earth here. But not all the possible shapes and patterns. Anyhow these Martians would respond to stimuli; they would have reflexes; they would condition their reflexes. I believe if we could call up the spirit of dear old Pavlov, we should find him agreeing with us, that the chances are heavily in favour of any possible minds there being minds fundamentally like ours.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'But with a longer past.'.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Yes, Mars was cool long before earth was. A longer past, a hotter summer and a harder winter—the year of Mars is twice the length of ours—a larger body and a larger brain. With more room for memories—more and better memories—and more space for ideas, more and better ideas. And so the problem comes down to this. What sort of mind would a man have if he had a longer ancestry, an ampler memory, a less hurried Life?'

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'I accept all that as just possible,' said the doctor.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'It is certainly where the weight of probability lies. Now all these pseudo-scientific story-writers who write about Mars make their Martians monsters and horrors, inhuman in the bad sense, cruel. Why should they be anything of the sort? Why,' repeated Professor Keppel, taking coffee, 'why should they be anything of the sort?'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Quite nice monsters?'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Why not?'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Well, the German professor evolved his idea of a camel from his inner consciousness; why shouldn't we do the same with our Martians?'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Having regard to the facts. Why not?'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

Dr. Holdman Stedding looked at his watch.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Not till you've smoked one of those pennant-shaped Coronas you like,' said Keppel, 'and just a whiff of brandy. Because, confound it! you started this talk, you've interested me, and you've got to hear it out. If there is such a thing as a Martian, rest assured, Holdman Stedding, he's humanity's big brother.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Big in every way you think. A super-super man.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Good anyhow.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Beyond good and evil.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Everything alive must have its good and evil. Beyond our good and evil anyhow. None the worse for that perhaps. No; if you talk of your lunatic again, you can at least dispel any fear he has of his Martians. The odds are they are not so much invading us as acting as a sort of inter-planetary tutor. Bless my heart! At the mere thought I feel a sort of benevolent influence.'

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'No,' said Dr. Holdman Stedding, emitting a smoke jet with the appreciative expression of a cigar advertisement in Punch and weighing the possibilities of the case with luxurious deliberation. 'It's your cook.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

3.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'She's a very good cook,' Professor Keppel admitted. 'But about these Martians. We are letting our fancy play too wildly about them. Let's leave them for a bit. There's another point your patient has raised that's quite available for separate treatment. Practically another question. There may or may not be these sane and mature watchers over human destiny, these Celestial Uncles, these friends in the mdnight sky, but what does seem to be possible and even within our reach is this idea, that the species Homo sapiens, because of some possible increase or change in the direction of the cosmic rays, or from some other unknown cause, is starting to mutate, and mutate along some such line as that larger wisdom indicates.'

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'Some sort of large wisdom,' said Dr. Holdman Stedding, 'a purely hypothetical wisdom.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'You are very precise,' said Professor Keppel. 'But anyhow that is what we want to know. Is there such a biological movement going on? Is there any means of tracing it if it is going on? The real feeling at the back of both our minds is that, if there is not something of the sort going on, then this breed of pretentious, self-protective imbeciles—'

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'Poor Homo sapiens!' murmured the doctor. 'How he catches it nowadays!'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Is very near the end of its tether. It's no good pretending you disagree with that. Haven't all reasonable civilized men nowadays this feeling of being dilettantes on a sinking ship? We all want a break towards something better in the way of living. Hopes and our wishes speak together. And it may be—as we half hope. But how are we to test this idea? How are we to set about the investigation?'

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'Without making everyone think we have gone crazy?'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Precisely.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Nietzsche?' hazarded the doctor. 'Are these his supermen we are thinking about?'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'He brings too much Oriental bric-à-brac for my taste,' said Keppel. 'And so far as I can make out, he has at least two different meanings for that Ubermensch of his. On the one hand is a biologically better sort of man and on the other a sort of aggregate synthetic being like Hobbes's Leviathan. You never know how to take him. Let's rule Nietzsche out Let us just follow up this question whether there is an increase in—what shall I call them?—high-grade intellectual types.'

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The doctor helped himself with infinite restraint and discretion to just the merest splash more brandy. 'I think, Keppel, there may be a possible way to set this note of interrogation working.'

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'We have our reputations to consider.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'We have our reputations to consider, but quite possibly this fellow—well, to commit a very slight indiscretion—it is Mr. Joseph Davis, the man who writes those extremely popular, those florid—shall I say?—those almost too glorifying glosses, so to speak, on history—might do something for us in this respect. His writings, his association with what one might call the more romantic aspects of the human record, his almost strained belief in the faith, hope, and glory of our species, put him, I think, in a position to ask questions… .'

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'Joseph Davis,' considered Keppel. 'The man who wrote From Agincourt to Trafalgar? Him! You got this idea about the Martians from him!'

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'I told him to think no more about it.'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'But he will?'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'He will. He wants to think about it. He wants to follow this up. He—something has shaken him up. I can't make up my mind whether he is going mad or going sane. But if I give him half a hint, he'll be off on the scent of these Martians now like a dog after a rabbit'

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

Chapter 6 Opening Phases of the Great Eugenic Research

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

1.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir

'Now here, now there,' whispered Mr. Davis to himself as he stood on the doorstep of the headmaster of Gorpel School and looked at the headmaster's trim but beautiful garden.

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It was six months later and high summer and he was the father of an extremely healthy but extremely intelligent-looking child. And the belief that he had discovered that the most wonderful event in the history of our planet was now happening had entered into and become part of his being.

دنیای رمان مرجع رمان های ایرانی و خارجی. https://novelonline.ir