Time Travel Omnibus, page 170
“They walked straight out into the field; and do you know, that little fellow, pure monster in appearance, ugly as ultimate sin, did a thing that brought tears to my eyes. As he came to the edge of the walk and stepped off into the grass, he bent laboriously over and plucked a daisy—and looked at it in preoccupied fashion as he toddled on after the others!
“I was much relieved that they had not discovered us, and so was Pearl. As soon as they were a safe distance away, she whispered to me:
“ ‘I had to be careful. They all can see, and the two younger ones still can hear.’
“ ‘What are they going to do out there?’ I asked.
“ ‘Take a lesson in metaphysics,’ she answered, and almost with her words the first one sat down thoughtfully out in the middle of the field—‘to be followed in turn by the second and even the little fellow!
“ ‘The tallest one,’ Pearl informed me, ‘is the one who is to take a place in the vacant cell. He had better do it soon. It’s becoming dangerous for him to walk about. His neck’s too weak.’
“With care we edged our way up and into the building, but this time Pearl conducted me along the corridor on the other side. The dust there was as thick as in the first, except along the middle, where many footprints testified to much use. We came to the incubators.
“There I saw them. I saw them; I made myself look at them; but I tell you it was an effort! I—I think, if you don’t mind, I won’t describe them. You know—my personal peculiarity. They were wonderful. Curvings of glass and tubes. Two, in them. Different stages. I left right away; went back to the front door; and in a few minutes felt better.
“Pearl, of course, had to come after me and try to take me back; and I noticed an amusing thing. The sight of those coming babies had had a sort of maternal effect on her! I swear it! For she would talk about them; and before long she timidly—ah, but as dryly, as ever!—suggested that we attempt a kiss!—only she forgot the word and called it a scrape. Ye gods! Well, we scraped—exactly as before—and that, my friends, was the incident which led straight and terribly to the termination of the genus Homo Sapiens!
“You could never imagine what happened. It was this, like one-two-three: Pearl and I touched lips; I heard a soft, weird cry behind me; I wheeled; saw, in the entrance, side by side, the three creatures I had thought were safely out in the field getting tutored; saw the eldest’s face contort, his head wabble; heard a sharp snap; and then in a twinkling he had fallen over on the other two; and when the dust had settled we saw the young flowers of perfect humanity in an ugly pile, and they lay still, quite still, with, each one, a broken neck!
“They represented the total stock of the race, and they were dead, and I had been the innocent cause!
“I was scared; but how do you think their death affected Pearl? Do you think she showed any sign of emotion? She did not. She ratiocinated. She was sorry, of course—so her words said—the tallest guy had been such a beautiful soul!—a born philosopher!—but it had happened; there was nothing to do about it except remove the bodies, and now it was up to her alone to look after the incubators and that cemetery of thinkers.
“ ‘But first,’ she said, ‘I’d better take you back to your time.’
“ ‘But no!’ I said, and I invented lots of reasons why I’d better stay a little. Now that there was no one to discover my presence I more than ever did not want to go. There were a hundred things I wanted to study—the old men, how they functioned, the conditions of the outside world, and so on—but particularly, I confess, I wanted to examine the contents of that building. If it could produce a time traveler, it must contain other marvels, the secrets of which I might be able to learn and take back home with me.
“We went out into the sun’ and argued, and my guide did a lot of squatting and meditating, and in the end I won out. I could stay three days.
“On the afternoon of the first day something went wrong with the incubators, and Pearl came hurrying to tell me in her abstracted fashion that the two occupants, the last hopes of the human race, were dead.
“She did not know it, but I had done things to the mechanisms of the incubators.
“I had murdered those unborn monsters——
“Charles, Miles, let’s have some more tea.”
VII.
FRICK went over to the thermos bottle, poured for us, returned it to the floor, and resumed his chair. We rested for several minutes, and my dictograph shows that again not a word was spoken. I will not try to describe my thoughts except to say that the break in the tension had found me in need of the stimulation I was given.
When Frick resumed, it was suddenly, with unexpected bitterness and vehemence.
“Homo Sapiens had become a caricature and an abomination!” he exclaimed. “I did not murder those unborn babies on impulse, nor did I commit my later murders on impulse. My actions were considered; my decisions were reached after hours of the calmest, clearest thinking I have ever done; I accepted full responsibility, and I still accept it!
“I want now to make a statement which above all I want you to believe. It is this. At the time I made up my mind to destroy those little monsters, and so terminate Genus Homo, I expected to bring Pearl back to live out her years in our time. That was the disposition I had planned for her. Her future did not work out that way. To put it baldly, Mother Nature made the most ridiculous ass of all time out of me; but remember, in justice to me, that the current of events got changed after my decision.
“I have said that Pearl took the death of the race’s only young stock in her usual arid manner. She certainly did; but, as I think back over those days, it seems to me she did show a tiny bit, oh, a most infinitesimal amount, of feeling. That feeling was directed wholly toward me. You may ask how she could differ temperamentally—and physically—from those others, but I can only suggest that the enigma of her personal equation was bound up in the unique conditions of her birth. As she said, she may have been ‘bad material’ to start with. Then, something had gone wrong with an incubator; she was born after only eleven months; was four months premature; had received remote prenatal tutoring for that much less time; and had functioned in a different and far more physical manner much earlier, and with fewer built-in restraints, than the others.
“It was this difference in her, this independence and initiative, that caused her to find the time traveler, the unused and forgotten achievement of a far previous age. It was this difference that allowed her to dare use it in the way we know. And it was this difference—now I am speaking chiefly of her physical difference—that gave rise in me to the cosmic ambitions which took me from farce to horror, and which I will now try to describe.
“Toward the evening of the second day we sat out on the wold grass before that corroboree of static philosophers and discussed the remaining future of the human race.
“I argued, singe there was no one else to look after them now, and since they could live only as long as she lived, it was clear that the best thing—and, in the event of accident to her, the most humane thing—would be for me to kill them all as painlessly as possible and take her back to my time to live.
“I need not mention the impossibility of there being any more descendants from them.
“But for the only time during all the period I knew her she refused to face the facts. She wouldn’t, admit a single thing; I got nowhere; argue and plead as I would, all she would say, over and over, was that it was a pity that the human race had to come to an end. I see now that I was dense to take so long to get what she was driving at. When I did finally get it I nearly fell over backward in the grass.
“My friends, she was delicately hinting that I was acceptable to her as the father of a future race!
“Oh, that was gorgeous! I simply couldn’t restrain my laughter; I had to turn my back; and I had a devil of a time explaining what I was doing, and why my shoulders shook so. To let her down easily, I told her I would think it over that night and give her my decision in the morning. And that was all there was to it at the time.
“Now comes the joke; now comes the beginning of my elevation to the supreme heights of asshood, and you are at liberty to laugh as much as you please. That night, under the low-hung stars of that far future world, I did decide to become the father of a future race! Yes—the single father of ultimate humanity!
“That night was perhaps the most tremendous experience of my life. The wide thinking I did! The abandoned planning! What were not the possibilities of my union with Pearl! She, on her side, had superb intellectuality, was the product of millions of years’ culture; while I had emotion, vitality, the physicalness that she and the withered remains of her people so lacked! Who might guess what renaissance of degenerated humanity our posterity might bring! I walked, that night; I shouted; I laughed; I cried. I was to become a latter-day god! I spent emotion terrifically; it could not last till dawn; morning found Pearl waking me, quite wet with dew, far out in the hills.
“I had settled everything in my mind. Pearl and I would mate, and nature would take her course; but there was one prime condition. There would have to be a house cleaning, first. Those cartoons of humanity would have to be destroyed. They represented all that was absurd and decadent; they were utterly without value; they were a stench and an abomination. Death to the old, and on with the new!
“I told Pearl of my decision. She was not exactly torrid with gratitude when she heard me say I would make her my wife, but she did give some severely logical approval, and that was something. She balked, however, at my plan to exterminate her redoubtable exponents of the mental life. She was quite stubborn.
“All that day I tried to convince her. I pointed out the old folks’ uselessness; but she argued they were otherwise; that usefulness gives birth to the notion of beauty; that, therefore, beauty accompanies usefulness; and that because the old gentlemen were such paragons of subjective beauty they were, therefore, paragons of usefulness. I got lost on that airy plane of reasoning. I informed her that I, too, was something of an sesthetician, and that I had proved to myself they smelled bad and were intolerable; and how easy it would be to exterminate them!—how slender their hold on life!
“Nothing doing. At one time I made the mistake of trying vile humor. Here’s a splendid solution of the in-law problem! As if she could be made to smile! She made me explain what I had meant! And this seemed to give her new thinking material, and resulted in her going down into squat-thinks so often that I was almost ready to run amuck.
“I suppose there must be a great unconscious loyalty to race in humans, for even in that attenuated time Pearl, unsentimental as she always was, doggedly insisted that they be allowed to live out their unnatural lives.
“I never did persuade her. I forced her. Either they had to go or I would. Late that night she gave me her permission.
“I AWOKE the morning of the fourth day in glorious high spirits. This was the day that was to leave me the lord of creation! I was not at all disturbed that it entailed my first assuming the office of high executioner. I went gayly to meet Pearl and asked her if she had settled her mind for the work of the day. She had. As we breakfasted on some damnable stuff like sawdust we talked over various methods of extermination.
“Oh, I was in splendid spirits! To prove to Pearl that I was a just executioner, I offered to consider the case of each philostatician separately and to spare any for whom extenuating circumstances could be found. We started on the male monster of my first day. Standing before him in his cell I asked Pearl: “ ‘What good can you say of this alleged sesthetician?’
“ ‘He has a beautiful soul,’ she claimed.
“ ‘But look at his body!’
“ ‘You are no judge,’ she retorted. ‘And what if his body does decay?—his mind is eternal.’
“ ‘What’s he meditating on?’
“Pearl went into a think. After a moment she said, ‘A hole in the ground.’
“ ‘Can you interpret his thoughts for me?’ I asked.
“ ‘It is difficult, but I’ll try,’ she said. After a little she began tonelessly, ‘It’s a hole. There is something—a certain something about it——Once caught my leg in one——I pulled. Yes, there is something—ineffable——So-called matter around—air within——Holes—depth—moisture—leaks—juice——Yes, it is the idea of a hole——Hole—inverse infinity—holiness——’
“ ‘That’ll do!’ I said—and pulled the receptacle of all this wisdom suddenly forward. There was a sharp crack, like the breaking of a dry stick, and the receptacle hung swaying pendulously against his ribs. ‘Justice!’ I cried.
“The old woman was next. ‘What’s there good about her?’ I asked.
“ ‘She is a mother,’ Pearl replied.
“ ‘Enough!’ I cried, and the flip of my arm was followed by another sharp crack. ‘Justice to the mother who bore Homo Sapiens! Next!
“The next was an awful-looking wreck—worse than the first. ‘What good can you say of him?’ I asked.
“ ‘He is a great scientist.’
“ ‘Can you interpret his thoughts?’
“Pearl sunk and thunk. ‘Mind force——’ she said tonelessly. ‘How powerful—mm—yes, powerful——Basis of everything living—mm—really is everything—no living, all thinking—in direct proportion as it is not, there is nothing——Mm, yes, everything is relative, but everything together makes unity—therefore, we have a relative unit—or, since the reverse is the other half of the obverse, the two together equal another unity, and we get the equation: a relative unit equals a unit of relativity.
Sounds as if it might mean something. Einstein was a primitive. I agree with Wlyxzso. He was a greater mind than Yutwlxi. And so it is proved that mind always triumphs over matter——’
“ ‘Proved!’ I said—and crack went his neck! ‘Justice!’ I cried. ‘Next!’
“The next, Pearl told me, was a metaphysician. ‘Ye gods’ I cried; ‘don’t tell me that among this lot of supermetaphysicians there is a specialist and an ultra. What’s he thinking?’
“But this time poor Pearl was in doubt. ‘To tell the truth we’re not sure whether he thinks or not,’ she said, ‘or whether he is alive or dead. Sometimes we seem to get ideas so faint that we doubt if we really hear them; at others there is a pure blank.’
“ ‘Try,’ I ordered. ‘Try hard. Every last dead one must have his chance to be killed.’
“ ‘She tried. Eventually she said, ‘I really think he is alive——Truth—air—truth firmly rooted high in air—ah, branching luxuriantly down toward earth—but never touching, so I cannot quite reach the branches, though I so easily grasp the roots——’
“Crack’ ! went his neck.
“I cracked a dozen others. It got easier all the time. Then Pearl presented me to the prize of the collection. He had a head the size of a bushel basket.
“ ‘What good can you say of him?’
“ ‘He is the greatest of us all, and I do beg that you will spare him,’ was her reply. ‘I don’t know what his specialty is, but every one here regarded him so highly!’
“ ‘What is he thinking?’ I asked.
“ ‘That’s it,’ she replied. ‘No one knows. From birth he has never spoken; he used to drool at the mouth; no one has been able to detect any sign of cerebration. We put him in a cell very early. One of us gave an opinion that he was a congenital hydrocephalic idiot, but that was an error of judgment, for the rest of us have always been sure that his blankness is only apparent. His meditations are simply beyond our gross sensibilities. He no doubt ponders the uttermost problems of infinity.’
“ ‘Try,” I said. ‘Even he gets his chance.’
“Pearl tried, and got nothing. Crack! went his neck.
“And so it went. One by one, with rapid dispatch, and with a gusto that still surprises me when I think of it, I rid the earth of its public enemies. By the time the sun was high in the heavens the job was complete, and I had become the next lord of creation!
VIII.
“THE EFFECT of the morning’s work sent Pearl into a meditation that lasted for hours. When she came out of it she seemed her usual self; but inside, as I know now, something was changed, or, let us say, accelerated; and when this acceleration had reached a certain point my goosish ambition was ignominiously cooked. Ah, and very well cooked! Humorous and serious—I was well done on both sides!
“But realization of my final humiliation came late and suddenly. My thoughts were not at all on any danger like that, but on millions of darling descendants in whose every parlor would hang my picture, when Pearl came out of her extended trance.
“I had decided to be awfully nice to her—a model father even if not the perfect lover—so it was almost like a courtier that I escorted her out on the field and handed her over to a large stone, where she promptly sat and efficiently asked what I wanted. I imagined she showed a trace of disappointment when I told her I only wished to talk over some arrangements relative to our coming civilization; but she made no remark, let me paint a glowing picture of the possibilities, and agreed with me on the outlines of the various plans I had formed.
“I was in a hurry. I asked her if she desired to slip back to my time to have the ceremony performed.
“This offer was, I thought, a delicate gesture on my part. She came back with what amounted to a terrific right to the heart. She said severely:
“ ‘Yes, Frick, I will marry you, but first, you must court me.’
“Observe, now, Miles, and you, Charles, my rapid ascent to asshood’s most sublime peak. Countless other men have spent their lives trying to attain that dizzy height; a few have almost reached its summit, but it remained for me, the acting lord of creation, to achieve it. For—there was nothing else to do about it—I began to-court her!
