The Greatest Sci-Fi Books of Erle Cox. Erle Cox

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      Chapter XXII

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      "So the woman lives," said Earani. "There is no miracle about it, Dick. There are many things in your daily life that would have been miracles one hundred years ago that you pass over now without a second thought."

      "I doubt if I could get Walton to look at it in that light. He almost feels that the woman has shown an indecent contempt for medical practice in recovering."

      "You have not told him?" asked Alan.

      "Hardly," replied Barry, with a laugh. "I haven't the nerve. The first question he would ask would be what drug I had used. I'd reply that I hadn't the faintest idea. Of course, he'd feel convinced then that I am a genius. He'd tell me so, too. No, Dun, when I tell Walton anything about it, I'll want to be able to tell him a good deal more than that."

      "You are on the verge of many things now, Dick, but you could not go forward much further without the aid of Maxi's lens. Our race came to the same wall that stopped them until Maxi broke it down," said Earani.

      "Then Maxi was the second of your great men?" asked Alan.

      "Yes, and to my mind the greatest of the three. He spent his life on the one work and succeeded. They thought him mad at first. He knew that every living organism gave out light rays that the human eye cannot see. His lens is really an artificial eye that can detect these rays and convey them to the brain direct. He was originally attempting to invent a substitute for the natural eye in cases where it had been destroyed, when he first gathered the threads that he followed through all their windings until the great work was completed. It took him twenty-five years of uninterrupted labour, and what a labour it was! He faced the years of failure without flinching. He could make no converts to his hopes and his idea. On every side there was ridicule and derision, and against it all he never once faltered. Absolutely alone, and without the help of one friendly hand, he won through. His recognition came in his lifetime, and he bore his triumph as simply as he had borne his reverses. He put aside with a smile all the honours they offered him. 'You can give nothing I desire now but rest, and my work has won that for me,' was his answer when they asked him to name his own reward."

      "He had no need of a monument, Earani," interrupted Barry.

      She shook her head. "Not while his work lives. Think of the results. The average life of mankind at the time of Maxi's invention was about forty-eight years! Within two hundred years the average was well over one hundred years, and later it rose to one hundred and twenty with a maximum of one hundred and sixty. You must understand, too, that a man of one hundred years was not a tottering wreck of humanity, but a being as mentally and physically robust as one of forty in the pre-Maxi days, and many up to one hundred and fifty years retained their faculties to the full, and every step that led to this revolution was solely due to Maxi's lens. Without it even the work of Eukary would have been impossible."

      "Ah!" interjected Barry, "and Eukary was the third person of your trinity?"

      Earani nodded. "He came two hundred years after the old Doctor, and was one of the worshippers of his memory." She turned to Alan. "He was one of those that nature gives to the world once in a thousand years, like your Napoleon. He rose from the ranks, and for fifty years he ruled the world with a rod of steel. It was not a nation or a confederation that he ruled, but the entire world. He ruled ruthlessly and mercilessly, and when he died he left us a new world and a new religion."

      "A new religion is a doubtful sort of legacy," said Alan with a smile.

      Barry straightened up. "That's a fact from our point of view, Earani. Every religion that our world has been given so far has been as fatal from a point of mortality as a new disease. You see the converts as a rule have felt it incumbent on them to spread the glad tidings, even if they had to do it with an axe. The unbeliever had to love his enlightener, even if he had to be hammered into doing it. As a consequence, religions generally meant new causes for war, so they have been pretty fatal, taking them all round."

      "There's nothing like the hatred that a really bigoted religious fanatic can raise for a rival creed," put in Alan.

      "Perhaps Eukary's religion was an exception?" asked Barry.

      "He met the usual reward of the reformer," she smiled. "Hate and spite and intrigue–but he was too great to feel or fear them, aye, or to notice them, except where they interfered with his plans."

      "And then?" asked Alan.

      "And then he struck once–there was never need for a second blow, and he never gave warning. He knew he was right, and he would not let one life or a thousand stand in the way of the future of the race. He taught us the worship of the unborn.

      "He started from the theory that if infinite care in breeding be necessary in producing the highest class of animal or vegetable life, then it is so much the more necessary in producing the highest type of human life. We know that a weed can be cultivated until it becomes a splendid flower and that if neglected it will ultimately revert to its original worthless type. We know that the finest class of domestic animals are those that result from careful breeding. And humanity, Dick?" she paused.

      "Left to carry on anyhow. It's a tremendous handicap. Reproducing at our own sweet will in the sacred cause of individual liberty, and to the detriment of the race. It's a wonder we have ever pulled through so far, or so well. It can't be helped, anyhow," was Barry's comment.

      "It can be altered!" answered Earani decisively. "It has been once in the world's history. Eukary made no move until he had absolutely proved what was afterwards known as Eukary's Law of Transmission. When he propounded that law the world stopped sufficiently long in its work to find that it had discovered a new joke, and when the joke grew stale, both it and he were forgotten. The jesters would not have been so lighthearted had they known their man a little better."

      "Curious, is it not?" said Alan, "when you think of it, how some–in fact, nearly all–of the men who have radically affected the world have been considered a subject for a jest in the beginning."

      Earani smiled. "I suppose if you could trace the intimate history of the times there were many who jested at Mahomet, Caesar, Napoleon– aye, or perhaps even of your Divine Prophet. It has always been so, and will always be so while fools are born into the world."

      "Consider the majority they are, Earani," said Barry with a laugh.

      Earani nodded. "We had our share, Dick, but Eukary lowered the average."

      Alan made an extravagant gesture of supplication. "Oh! Great Queen, grant us, we implore you, the formula, for never a world of all СКАЧАТЬ