H G Wells Omnibus, page 302
‘And what may that be?’ asked the barrister.
‘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.’
His eyes, which had been partly open, closed again.
‘You said,’ said the examining barrister, ‘that fortunately they are kept off. Why—fortunately? May I ask?’
‘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.’
‘Not always,’ said Foxfield suddenly.
‘I’ve heard of that idea you’re alluding to, Mr. Foxfield,’ said the old gentleman. ‘You mean that idea about the chromosomes.’
‘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.’
‘I have no doubt of it,’ said Foxfield.
‘You’ll find no physicist to encourage you,’ said the old gentleman.
‘Or contradict me,’ said Foxfield.
‘Aye, aye,’ said the old gentleman cheerfully. ‘It’s a case of not proven.’
‘But what is this?’ asked Davis. ‘Do you mean that these—these cosmic rays may affect heredity—inheritance?’
‘I should be inclined to say they must,’ said Foxfield.
‘But why them in particular?’ asked the barrister.
‘Because we have eliminated almost every other possible cause for changes in the chromosomes,’
‘It’s a most extraordinary thing,’ said the rufous man, slowly waking up and passing by swift stages from sleepiness to a bright alertness.
‘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.’
‘Transmission of acquired characteristics strictly forbidden,’ someone interjected.
‘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.’
And now it was Foxfield’s turn to answer intelligent questions and give a brief lecture.
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.
‘But why not Providence?’ asked the quiet man.
‘Because the vast majority of these mutations are aimless and useless,’ said Foxfield.
‘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.’
‘What an unsettled universe it is!’ said someone.
3.
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—’
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.
‘Suppose these cosmic rays come from Mars!’
‘They come, I tell ye, from every direction,’ said the old professor.
‘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—’
He held up his hand and wagged his fingers with pleasure at his idea.
‘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.’
‘And so they start firing away at us with these cosmic rays!’
‘And presently,’ said the rufous man, almost gobbling with the excitement of his idea, ‘presently when they have got the world Martianized—’
‘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.’
‘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?’
The old professor’s back made no reply. And yet it had a certain eloquence.
‘They’d probably begin with wild mutations,’ somebody suggested after a pause; ‘and then get more accurate.’
‘It may have been going on for a long time,’ said the quiet man, helpful as ever.
‘You’re assuming of course that they know a lot more about us than we know about them,’ said the rising barrister.
‘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?’
‘The jokes of today may become the facts of tomorrow,’ said Foxfield. ‘Nonsense pro tem, let us say.’
‘I’m beginning to believe my own story,’ said the rufous man. ‘With your endorsement. It’s wonderful.’
‘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?’
‘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.’
‘Mostly unfavourable variation though?’ asked the barrister.
‘Ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent,’ said Foxfield. ‘With no survival value at all. Chance. Like the wildest experimenting… .’
4.
Now this was the last kind of stuff to which an anxious prospective parent on the verge of neurasthenia ought to have listened.
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.
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.
Chapter 3
Mr. Joseph Davis Wrestles with an Incredible Idea
1.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
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.
‘I suppose everything is going all right with Mary?’ he asked, advancing uneasily into the consulting-room.
‘Couldn’t be better.’
‘You made a second examination?’
‘At your request. It was unnecessary.’
‘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?’
‘It is coming on well. There is absolutely no ground for worry.’
‘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.’
‘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?’
‘Well,’ said Davis, sticking to his point, ‘is she normal?’
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.’
‘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?’
‘Really, Mr. Davis! What’s fretting your mind? With her clearheadedness and your literary genius your child may be something quite outstanding.’
‘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—’
2.
He kept the doctor waiting for a moment.
‘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?’
‘Exceptional? Gifted?’
‘Yes, gifted. In some cases perhaps. And also—what shall I say?—abnormalities?’
‘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.’
‘To the same extent?’ pressed Davis. ‘To the same extent?’
‘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… .’
Pause.
‘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.’
‘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.’
‘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.’
‘Ye-es,’ said the doctor, with non-committal encouragement in his tone.
‘And as if it became more capable of accepting abnormalities and weaving them into its destinies.’
‘Yes,’ said the doctor, weighing the proposition. ‘That is in accordance with current ideas.’
‘As an industrious student of history,’ began Mr. Davis. ‘You know I have written one or two books?’
‘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.’
‘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?’
‘I wish you would explain a little more.’
‘Suppose there are—Martians.’
‘Well.’
‘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.’
‘How?’
‘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… .’
‘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.’
‘This is quite a different idea.’
‘Well?’
‘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.’
‘But how?’
‘You have heard of cosmic rays, Doctor?’
The doctor took it in with some deliberation. ‘It is a quite fantastic idea,’ he said after a pause.
‘But neither impossible nor incredible.’
‘Some things one puts outside the range of practical possibility.’
‘And some things refuse to be put outside the range of practical possibility.’
