Read Ebook: The Messiah of the Cylinder by Rousseau Victor Coll Joseph Clement Illustrator

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Ebook has 1457 lines and 75109 words, and 30 pages

I Over the Coffee Cups 1

II The Great Experiment 16

V London's Welcome 53

VI The Strangers' House 66

X The Domed Building 108

XX The Sweep of the Net 237

PAGE

I made my difficult way toward the stairs 34

I glanced from one to another, and met hard, mirthless eyes, and mouths twisted in sneering mockery 50

"Woe to you, accursed city!" he screamed, "Woe to you in the day of judgment! Woe to your whites and harlots when the judgment comes!" 150

It pulled me through the window-gap and I swung far out above the Airscouts' Fortress 172

A man near me leaped up and craned his neck, looking into the gloom 242

A tall man with a black beard and a curved sword sheath that clanked on the stones. I recognized in him Mehemet, the Turkish commander 244

Sanson's indomitable will flamed out. "I will not drink!" he cried, and flung the cup to the floor 258

The giant leaped out before his followers. "Where is Lembken?" he roared. "Where are the men?" 286

Upon the walls the Guard were swarming toward the defenders. Out of their midst the Ray artillery belched 300

The giant jaws upon our aircraft gaped. I saw steel teeth within them 308

The Messiah of the Cylinder

If I recall the conversation of that evening so minutely as to appear tedious, I must plead that this was the last occasion on which I saw Sir Spofforth alive. In such a case, one naturally remembers incidents and recalls words that otherwise might have been forgotten; besides, here were the two opposed opinions of life, as old as Christianity, confronting each other starkly. And, as will be seen, the test was to come in such manner as only one of us could have imagined.

I picture old Sir Spofforth as on that evening: courteous, restrained, yet with the heat of conviction burning in his measured phrases; and Esther listening with quaint seriousness, turning from her father to Lazaroff and back, and sometimes to me, as each of us spoke. Outside, in the moonlight, the shadow of the Institute lay black across the garden of Sir Spofforth's house. The dining-room was fragrant with the scent of the tea-roses that grew beneath the windows.

The Biological Institute was less than five years old, but the London smoke, which drifted beyond Croydon, already had darkened the bright-red bricks to a tolerable terra cotta. The ivy had grown a good way up the walls. The Institute was accommodating itself to the landscape, as English buildings had the knack of doing. Lazaroff and I had been there under Sir Spofforth since the foundation, and there never had been any others upon the staff, the Institute being organized for specialized work of narrow scope, though of immense perspective.

It was devoted to private research into the nature of life, in the application of the Mendelian law to vertebrates. The millionaire who had endowed it for this purpose and then died opportunely, had not had time to hamper us with restrictions. Next to endowing us, his death was, perhaps, the most imaginative thing that he had ever accomplished. The Government concerned itself only about our vivisection certificates. But our animal experimentation was too innocuous for these to be much more than a safeguard. Carrel's investigations in New York, a year or two before, had shown the world that cell and tissue can not only survive the extinction of the general vital quantity, but, under proper conditions, proliferate indefinitely. We were investigating tissue life, and our proceedings were quite innocuous. It will be seen that we already had gotten away from Mendel, though we did breed Belgian hares, whose disappearance always caused Esther distress, and we made fanciful annotations inside ruled margins about "agoutis" and "allelomorphs."

I am conscious now that we worked constantly under a sense of constraint; there was an unnecessary secrecy in all our plans and actions. Why? I think, when I look back, that it was not because of what we were doing, but rather of what it might become necessary some day to do. The work was so near to sacrilege--I mean, we viewed the animal structure as a mechanism rather than as a temple. That, of course, was then the way of all biologists; but that, I think, was the cause of our rather furtive methods. We were hot on the trail of the mystery of life, and never knew upon what intimacies we might stumble. We sought to discover how and where consciousness is born out of unconscious tissue vitality. Lazaroff had the intuition of genius, and his inductions were amazing. Still, that problem baffled him.

"Pennell," I hear him say, "at a certain period of growth, when millions of cells, working cooperatively, have grouped themselves in certain patterns, completing the design, consciousness comes into play. Why? Is it a by-product, the creak that accompanies the wheel? But Nature produces nothing in vain. Then why should we know that we exist? Why?"

Lazaroff was a Prussian Pole, I believe, though he spoke half a dozen languages fluently. Keen and fanatical, daring, inflexible, he seemed to me the sort of man who would welcome the chance to proclaim a Holy War for Science and die in the front rank. He had the strange old German faith that was called monism, and his hope for the human race was as strong as his contempt for the man of our day.

"The race is all, Pennell," I hear him say again. "We of this age, who pride ourselves on our accomplishments, are only emerging from the dawn of civilization. We are still encumbered with all the ghostly fears that obsessed our ancestors of the Stone Age. But others will build the Temple of Truth upon the foundations that we are rearing. Oh, if I could have been born a hundred years ahead! For the change is coming fast, Pennell!"

And, when I professed to doubt the nearness of that change: "If your frontal area varied by only five centimeters, Pennell, you would believe. That is your tragedy, to fall short of the human norm by five centimeters of missing forehead."

I can see his well-proportioned figure, and the mane of black hair thrown back; the flashing eyes. Animated by religious impulse, Lazaroff would have gone to the stake as unconcernedly as he would certainly have burned others. He had invented a system of craniometry by which he professed to discover the mentality of his subject, and I was his first.

Certainly the conditions were ideal for our work. We were both young men, enthusiasts; and Sir Spofforth Moore, our chief, was nearing eighty. The Trustees had picked him for the post because of his great name in the medical world. He was an ideal chief. He interfered with us no more than the Trustees did. He asked for no results. The Institute existed only for patient research. Yes, the millionaire had certainly displayed imagination for a millionaire, and it was fortunate that he died before his hobby, whose inception came to him, I believe, from reading sensational newspaper articles, grew into an obsession.

The Trustees refused to accept Sir Spofforth's resignation when he became infirm. He lent the Institute dignity and prestige. I doubt whether he knew much of Mendelism, or had followed the work of the past five years. He knew little of what we were doing, and initialed our vouchers without ever demurring. Of course he tried to keep in touch with us, and I will confess that our routine work was mainly a cover for the daring plan that Lazaroff had, bit by bit, outlined to me.

"You see, Pennell," he explained in self-justification, "the work must be done. And where are there such opportunities as here? Science cannot be bound by the provisions of a dead man's deed. It is not likely that Sir Spofforth would object, either, but the Trustees might have intelligence enough to pick up the idea from the quarterly reports if we were entirely frank, and a biologist with imagination is called a charlatan. And we must work quickly, while we have this chance. When Sir Spofforth dies the Trustees will probably pick some fussy little busybody who will want to poke his nose into everything and take personal charge. Then--what of our experiment?"

The idea aroused me to as much enthusiasm as Lazaroff. And yet there was disappointment in the knowledge that we should never know the results of it.

In brief, Lazaroff's scheme was this: If animal tissues, removed from the entire organism, can exist in a condition of suspended vitality for an indefinite time, at a temperature suited to them in conditions which forbid germ life to flourish, why not the living animal? Lazaroff had selected three monkeys from among our stock for the experiment. They were to be sealed each in a vacuum cylinder of special design, and left for a century.

"The more I think about the plan, the more enthusiastic I become, Pennell," Lazaroff cried. "If the unconscious cell life survives indefinitely, why not the entire organism plus consciousness?"

"Much may happen in a hundred years, Lazaroff," I answered.

"True, Pennell. But they will never find the vault. Even now, before it is sealed, it would not be looked for, built as it is into the cellar wall beneath the freezing-plant. It was to this end, you know, that I brought down workmen from London, instead of employing local talent. Well--we shall leave papers. Earthquakes and revolutions may happen overhead, but a hundred years hence, when the papers are opened, a search will be made. Our traveling simians will be found by a very different world, I assure you, Pennell!"

He had the light of an enthusiast in his eyes, and his mood aroused my own imagination.

"What use is that, Lazaroff?" I cried. "We shall not know the results of our experiment. And what message can monkeys carry to that world concerning ours? If monkeys, why not men?"

He looked at me fixedly, smiling ever so little, and I perceived that he had drawn the expression of that thought out of the depths of my own mind by his strong will. Now he nodded in approbation.

"Pennell--" he began, with hesitation, "do you want to know why I myself do not--?" He stopped. "I am almost ashamed to tell you what it is that makes me wish to live out my life among my contemporaries," he continued. "How strong the primal instincts are in all of us, Arnold! Nature, with her blind, but perfectly directed will, warring on mind, and mind rising slowly to dominate her, armed, as she is, with her dreadful arsenal of a thousand superstitions, instincts, terrors. It is a fearful battle, Arnold, and many of us fall by the way."

He turned aside abruptly, as if he regretted the half-confidence. I thought I knew what he meant, and I was stirred too.

We dined that night with Sir Spofforth and Esther in their new house within a stone's throw of the Institute. Esther was the only child; her mother had died during her infancy. We four had been intimates during the whole five years of the Institute's existence; strangely alone, we four, in the busy Surrey town. The memory of that last night is the most poignant that remains to me. How far away it seems, and how long ago! If I could have known then that our companionship was ended!

The argument to which I have referred began after dinner, over our coffee. It was our usual hour for disputations, but they had never been so keen, nor Lazaroff so outspoken. Sir Spofforth was a man of the old school of thought, religious, tolerant, and withal more disquieted than he himself was aware, by the dominant materialism of the younger men; and Lazaroff had all the tactlessness of his Jena training. There were rumors of war with Germany, but Sir Spofforth was too old to adjust his mind immediately to this conception. He grew heated, as always, on the cynical scheme of the democratic government, dictated by its greed for power, to force Ulster beneath an alien yoke, upon the loud and stunning silence of our English pacifists and lovers of oppressed nations where their sincerity would be best proved. He deplored the new and dangerous doctrines that were permeating society, the decay of morals, the loss of reverence and pride in service. Civilization, he said, seemed dying, and democracy its murderer.

"Dying! It is still struggling in its birth throes!" cried Lazaroff impetuously. "I grant that the democracy of today has proved its futility. But there is a new democracy to come. We are enslaved by the traditions of the past, by a worn-out religious system based upon the primitive animistic notion of a soul. There is the fatal weakness of our democracy. Science has never found the smallest trace of a soul; on the contrary, we know beyond doubt that we live in a mechanistic universe of absolute determinism."

I see Sir Spofforth's tolerant, yet eager look as he answered him.

"I grant you that the soul is not to be found in the dissecting-room, Herman," he answered. "I, as you know, have devoted my life to the empirical investigation of truth, and I do not decry the method. But you cannot ignore the interior way of analysis, through the one thing we know most intimately--consciousness."

"A by-product of matter," answered Lazaroff contemptuously. "Or, if we want to be precisely true, the sum and substance of cell consciousness."

"Well, throw the blame on the cell, then, in the modern fashion," said Sir Spofforth, smiling. "I doubt, though, whether you have solved the one big problem by creating some million smaller ones. On the contrary, you are postulating a hierarchy of intelligences, quite in the Catholic fashion. If brain consciousness is not a specialized form of omniscient consciousness, how does the brainless amoeba find its food and engulf it, or the vine its supports? If you have robbed us of the abortive hope of saving the little empire of the brain beyond the change of death--and I deny even that entirely--some of us have identified consciousness with a non-material personality functioning through all life and fashioning it."

"Vitalism!" scoffed Lazaroff.

I watched Esther's eager face as she looked from one speaker to the other. Sir Spofforth seemed more agitated than the situation warranted, and I saw him glance at his daughter a little nervously before he answered.

"Herman, I repeat that I have given my life to scientific investigation," he replied. "But I have always recognized the validity of the metaphysical inquiry. I believe Faith and Science have found their paths convergent. Lodge thinks so, too. Kelvin took that stand. James, your great psychologist, shifted before he died. Science must confine her activities within their natural bounds and not seek to play a pontifical part, or the excesses of the Scholastics will be repeated in a new and darker age."

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