¶1A Biological Fantasia
¶16This is the story of an idea and how it played about in the minds of a number of intelligent people.
¶17Whether 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.
¶190'Suppose these cosmic rays come from Mars!'
¶194'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.'
¶294'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!'
¶349'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.'
¶366'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.'
¶454'So I said to him. "Life," he said, "seems to me just one, Sir. I can't think of it in any other way. Sorry, Sir, I've tried."'
¶549'Why not the star-men?' said Keppel. 'Homosideralis? How would one say Star-Begotten as a specific adjective?'
¶550'One name seems to be as good as another,' said Davis, affecting indifference. 'Until we know better what they are, why trouble about the name? Let us stick to Martians.'
¶563'Let's see how far we have got,' said Keppel. 'Let us try to disentangle as far as we can the pure guess-fantasy of an extra-terrestrial intervention, from the established realities that Davis has been elucidating. A new sort of mind is coming into the world, with a new, simpler, clearer, and more powerful way of thinking. That I think is manifest. It has already got into operation individually here and there and produced a sort of disorder of innovation in human affairs. But so far these new minds haven't got together for any sort of associated living. So far. They are hardly aware of themselves, much less of each other. They are scattered about anyhow. All that, I think, seems to be established?'
¶567'But a damned unpleasant one,' said Dr. Holdman Stedding. 'When the superman makes an aeroplane and the ape gets hold of it.'
¶568'Nevertheless--a temporary phase,' continued Keppel, holding to his argument with resolute tenacity. 'Because, as I say, to begin with, these Martians have been rare and scattered. But as they become more numerous--and I assume that there is no reason whatever why they should not become more and more numerous--they will necessarily become aware of one another, and get into touch with one another. Such minds, following the line of least resistence, will gravitate to scientific work. They will note and classify mental types. This must lead almost directly to self-discovery. They will observe how they resemble each other and how they differ from the wimble-wamble of the common world. They will begin to know themselves for what they are.'
¶622'There is this secondary world which has worked its way into the language everywhere, a sort of fold in the membrane that has established itself in a thousand metaphors, got itself most unwarrantably taken for granted by nearly everybody. Other worldliness, the idea of a ghost world, a spirit world, side by side with actuality. It overlaps and lies beside reality, like it and yet different; a parody of it done in phantoms; a sort of fuddled overlap; a universe of imaginary emanations, the consequence of congenital squint. Beside every man we see his spirit--which is not really there--beside the universe we imagine a Great Spirit. Whenever the mental going is a bit hard, whenever our intellectual eyes feel the glare of truth, we lose focus and slither off into Ghostland. Ghostland is halfway to dreamland, where all rational checks are lost. In Ghostland, that world of the spirit, you can find unlimited justifications for your impulses; unlimited evasions from rational obligation. That�s my main charge against the human mind; this persistent confusing dualism. The last achievement of the human mind is to see life simply and see it whole,'
¶692'You make me feel like the sculptor's dog trying to explain his master's life to the musician's cat.'
¶711'Keppel,' said the doctor, 'let us be plain about this--you are foretelling now the end of common humanity. No less. This would not be human life. This new world is something beyond all ordinary experience, something alien.'
¶714'That is where my hate goes,' he said. 'I hate common humanity. This oafish crowd which tramples the ground whence my cloud-capped pinnacles might rise. I am tired of humanity--beyond measure. Take it away. This gaping, stinking, bombing, shooting, throat-slitting, cringing brawl of gawky, under-nourished riff-raff. Clear the earth of them!'
¶721'H'm,' said Davis, and then with a flash of intuition: 'But do you disbelieve it?'
¶820'You were star-begotten,' he said, 'and so was I.'
¶824The child lay on its side in its cot in a dreamless sleep. It scarcely seemed to breathe. The expression of that flushed little face with its closed eyes was one of veiled determination. One small clenched fist peeped over the coverlet. Afraid of change? Afraid of the renascence to come?
¶825Never, he thought, had anything in the world looked so calmly and steadfastly resolved to assert its right to think and act in its own way in its own time.