upon the parapet in front of Karenin so that he could see his

face. 'There is no absolutelimit to either knowledge or

power… I hope you do not tire yourself talking.'

'I am interested,' said Karenin. 'I suppose in a little while

men will cease to be tired. I suppose in a little time you will

give us something that will hurry away the fatigue products and

restore our jaded tissues almost at once. This old machine may

be made to run without slacking or cessation.'

'That is possible, Karenin. But there is much to learn.'

'And all the hours we give to digestion and half living; don't

you think there will be some way of saving these?'

Fowler nodded assent.

'And then sleep again. When man with his blazing lights made an

end to night in his towns and houses-it is only a hundred years

or so ago that that was done-then it followed he would presently

resent his eight hours of uselessness. Shan't we presently take

a tabloid or lie in some field of force that will enable us to do

with an hour or so of slumber and rise refreshed again?'

'Frobisher and Ameer Ali have done work in that direction.'

'And then the inconveniences of age and those diseases of the

system that come with years; steadily you drive them back and you

lengthen and lengthen the years that stretch between the

passionate tumults of youth and the contractions of senility. Man

who used to weaken and die as his teeth decayed now looks forward

to a continually lengthening, continually fuller term of years.

And all those parts of him that once gathered evil against him,

the vestigial structures and odd, treacherous corners of his

body, you know better and better how to deal with. You carve his

body about and leave it re-modelled and unscarred. The

psychologists are learning how to mould minds, to reduce and

remove bad complexes of thought and motive, to relieve pressures

and broaden ideas. So that we are becoming more and more capable

of transmitting what we have learnt and preserving it for the

race. The race, the racial wisdom, science, gather power

continually to subdue the individual man to its own end. Is that

not so?'

Fowler said that it was, and for a time he was telling Karenin of

new work that was in progress in India and Russia. 'And how is

it with heredity?' asked Karenin.

Fowler told them of the mass of inquiry accumulated and arranged

by the genius of Tchen, who was beginning to define clearly the

laws of inheritance and how the sex of children and the

complexions and many of the parental qualities could be

determined.

'He can actually DO--?'

'It is still, so to speak, a mere laboratory triumph,' said

Fowler, 'but to-morrow it will be practicable.'

'You see,' cried Karenin, turning a laughing face to Rachel and

Edith, 'while we have been theorising about men and women, here

is science getting the power for us to end that old dispute for

ever. If woman is too much for us, we'll reduce her to a

minority, and if we do not like any type of men and women, we'll

have no more of it. These old bodies, these old animal

limitations, all this earthly inheritance of gross

inevitabilities falls from the spirit of man like the shrivelled

cocoon from an imago. And for my own part, when I hear of these

things I feel like that-like a wet, crawling new moth that still

fears to spread its wings. Because where do these things take

us?'

'Beyond humanity,' said Kahn.

'No,' said Karenin. 'We can still keep our feet upon the earth

that made us. But the air no longer imprisons us, this round

planet is no longer chained to us like the ball of a galley

slave…

'In a little while men who will know how to bear the strange

gravitations, the altered pressures, the attenuated, unfamiliar

gases and all the fearful strangenesses of space will be

venturing out from this earth. This ball will be no longer enough

for us; our spirit will reach out… Cannot you see how that

little argosy will go glittering up into the sky, twinkling and

glittering smaller and smaller until the blue swallows it up.

They may succeed out there; they may perish, but other men will

follow them…

'It is as if a great window opened,' said Karenin.

Section 9

As the evening drew on Karenin and those who were about him went

up upon the roof of the buildings, so that they might the better

watch the sunset and the flushing of the mountains and the coming

of the afterglow. They were joined by two of the surgeons from

the laboratories below, and presently by a nurse who brought

Karenin refreshment in a thin glass cup. It was a cloudless,

windless evening under the deep blue sky, and far away to the

north glittered two biplanes on the way to the observatories on

Everest, two hundred miles distant over the precipices to the

east. The little group of people watched them pass over the

mountains and vanish into the blue, and then for a time they

talked of the work that the observatory was doing. From that they

passed to the whole process of research about the world, and so

Karenin's thoughts returned again to the mind of the world and

the great future that was opening upon man's imagination. He

asked the surgeons many questions upon the detailed possibilities

of their science, and he was keenly interested and excited by the

things they told him. And as they talked the sun touched the