CHAPTER XVIII - SANSON
For a long time I could not persuade them to let
me go. But I pleaded so hard and set out the arguments so forcibly that at last
I persuaded them. For it was clear that if Lembken, realizing that his power
was waning, should accept our offer, then my plan was the wisest; and, if he
refused, our desperate chance would lose but little by my death.
It was even possible that the rôle for which he
had cast me was the same that I was to play for the Cause. He had meant to use
me against Sanson; and the more I thought of it the stronger grew my conviction
that he had meant to have me challenge Sanson in the Temple.
So, one by one, the opposing arguments ended, and
the committee leader gave me my instructions.
“You must evade the battleplanes and enter London
afoot,” he said. “You will proceed to the People’s House, demand admission, and
offer Lembken our terms: his palace, honors, wealth and pleasures. If he
accepts you will return to us bearing his acceptance in the form of writing,
that we may have a hold on him to use with Sanson, should he betray us
afterward. If you are detected by the searchlights before you reach London, you
will be taken before Hancock, to whom you will make your demand for an
interview with his chief. A messenger will remain posted near this meeting
place in order to convey you to us on your return, wherever we may be. Now, God
be with you, Arnold!”
I think they understood the turmoil in my heart,
for they were very considerate, and troubled me with no more suggestions than
these. For myself, I confess that the thought of Esther’s peril obliterated
from my mind nearly all other considerations, and, in truth, I cared more for
her safety than for the Cause. I could do nothing till the time of her
awakening came; but, when she awakened, I meant to be at her side.
The rushlights were blown out, and we bade each
other adieu at the cellar entrance, and separated. Many of those who were
present had traveled miles through the forests in order to attend the meeting.
It had been arranged that David and Elizabeth should make their quarters with
the band commanded by the leader, to which the bishop and Paul belonged. I was
to accompany them as far as the old road, where our paths divided.
When we reached it, Elizabeth turned and, putting
her hands upon my shoulders, looked very earnestly at me.
“Arnold,” she said, “the day is near when we four
shall be friends in a happier world. God bless you and protect the woman you
love.”
I pressed her hands. Then David grasped my own in
his.
“Good-bye, Arnold,” he said. “The Providence that
brought you to me will act to save us all.”
And he, too, was gone. I waited at the edge of the
old road, watching them disappear among the trees. The last thing that I saw
was the bishop’s white beard, a spot in the darkness. Then I was alone, with
the London road before me, and a mission as desperate as any that was ever
undertaken, and as pregnant with possibilities.
I do not know how long I had been traveling,
whether five minutes or twenty, nor whether I walked or ran. I became conscious
of a soft whistling in the air, and, glancing up, saw a dark airplane, black
against the risen moon.
I sprang from the road and hid myself in the
underbrush.
The airplane dipped, passed me, and dipped again,
with the purpose, evidently, of alighting in the road. It passed beyond my
sight, flying low, and veering from side to side as its occupant examined the
ground for a resting place.
As I rose to continue my journey I heard a low
hail among the trees. I started around, to see the old bishop approaching me at
a jog-trot. He came up panting, and stood before me, holding his pastoral staff
against his breast.
“Did you see the airplane?” he asked, following
the road with his eyes.
“What are you doing here, Bishop Alfred?” I asked
in astonishment, for there was an expression of supreme, benignant happiness
upon his face. “Are you alone?”
“Yes, alone,” he answered, smiling. “I left them
quietly. They would not have let me go. I followed you until I saw the
airplane. I am going to Lembken in your place.”
“But you will be put to death!” I cried. “Surely,
you know—”
“Yes, but that is all right,” he answered. “It is
three years now since any priest was burned for the faith. I have been thinking
about it for a long time. Now I am ready. I am going into the People’s House to
preach the Gospel. I—I ran away from David,” he added, chuckling at the success
of his maneuver.
I threatened and pleaded in vain, for the old
man’s face had the joyousness of a child’s.
“It’s no use talking, Arnold,” he said, patting my
arm affectionately. “I am a stubborn man when my mind is made up, and it is
made up now. I have thought about it a long time. You see, I am the last bishop
in England. I am not a learned man, but the Lord Bishop of London”—how happily
he said that!—“laid hands on me an hour before they burned him in Westminster
Hall. Now it is right that I should follow him and take on martyrdom. It will
give inspiration to the people. It will be a wonderful encouragement to them to
see me among the fagots. I have prayed the Lord to give me strength, because I
am a cowardly old man, and He has done so. I should like to consecrate my
successor before I die. But the Russians will take care of that, and it is
fitter that they should renew the line in England. They will be here in a few
days to save the world, and then we shall all be one.”
“How do you know?” I cried.
“It is given to me to know,” he answered, wagging
his white head. “So there is no longer any reason why I should not go into the
People’s House and bear testimony to the truth. You can go back now. I will
carry your message to Lembken before I die.”
Before I could restrain him he had started off
along the road, and his quick jog-trot gave him almost as much speed as my
scrambling, wild pursuit. I caught him, however, a hundred yards away.
“Bishop Alfred, you must go back to your friends,”
I said. “Your idea is nonsense. There is no need to sacrifice yourself.”
He shook his head and detached himself. I stumbled
over a projecting root, and when I was on my feet again I saw the old man
another fifty yards away. Once more I was approaching him. And then I halted
suddenly and drew back among the trees, for just beyond the bend in the road
lay the dark airplane, and the old man had stopped beside it, evidently waiting
to be taken in.
However, since he continued to wait there, I
advanced noiselessly toward it, with the hope of rescuing him, until I realized
that the dark airplane was empty.
The occupant had left it, but for what reason, or
where he had gone, I could not surmise.
I was just where the old road joined with a small,
twisting path that struck back among the trees. Some instinct cautioned me to
silence. If I had spoken ... but I did not speak, and then, among the trees,
following the crooked trail not fifty paces away, I saw the aviator, walking
with head bent downward, evidently unconscious of human proximity.
I held my breath in terror lest the old man should
speak. But he stood motionless as a statue beside the dark airplane; he seemed
wrapt in a reverie. The hope arose of saving him. That was Hancock’s airplane;
his fate, then, lay with Hancock, and Lembken had told me that the Air-Admiral
was a Christian. Surely he would take pity on the old, childish man. He knew
me. I might appeal to him....
The twisting track, which had hidden him from my
eyes, brought him into view once more, clear against the low moon that made the
moving figure a silhouette against its circle. I crept up, until suddenly I
reeled and nearly fell, overcome by the magnitude of my discovery. For this was
not Air-Admiral Hancock, but Hugo Sanson, the madman who ruled the Federation!
For a few moments I was powerless to stir. A
raiding beast of night went rustling through the trees behind me. I heard an
owl hoot. I lurked like some savage in the underbrush, and everything went from
my memory, save Esther in peril, and Sanson, the evil genius of humanity,
powerless in my hands if I could spring on him and strangle him before he had
time to draw his Ray rod.
Then the tracking instinct awoke in me. I began
stalking him as stealthily as any moccasined redskin followed his quarry. He
was now only twenty paces away, and his walk showed that he suspected no
danger.
It was a trail unknown to me, and I could only
follow in patience. It wound to right and then to left, until at last it
blended in a wider trail. And then I knew where I was. We were on the road that
led to the cellar.
The scattered bricks became the heaping piles. I crouched
low. Almost upon this site Sir Spofforth’s house had stood. There, where the
beeches waved their leafless arms had been Esther’s tea-roses. And here were
briers, sprung, perhaps, from those. It did not need these remembrances to make
my resolution firm.
Sanson was going down. If he had gone there an
hour earlier he would have walked alone into the presence of men who had a
thousand deaths laid up against him. But Fate had saved him for me!
For an instant the thought occurred to me that
possibly Sanson, acquainted with the details of the popular conspiracy, had
come to offer terms against Lembken. But I dismissed that thought as
impossible. Sanson would hardly have come there for such a purpose; at least,
he would have come with the Guard.
The short ladder had been removed and hidden among
the trees, but Sanson seemed to know the way intimately. Lying upon my face
among the bricks, I saw Sanson enter the cellar, holding in one hand a little
solar light. He passed through the gap in the wall into the vault.
I made my own descent with infinite care, taking
pains to dislodge no stone that might betray my presence. Now I was in the
cellar on hands and knees, watching Sanson as he moved to and fro inside the
inner chamber. My brain was working like a mill—and yet I did not know wholly
what I should do. If I killed Sanson, could I be sure that his death would set
Esther free? Could I seize him and exact terms from him? Then there was a
certain difficulty in springing upon the man quickly enough to prevent him from
drawing his Ray rod; and there was the innate revulsion against choking a man
to death.
As I deliberated, Fate seemed to solve my problem,
for my fingers touched and closed about a smooth object that lay on the ground.
For a moment I thought it was the branch of a tree. But no branch grew so
smooth. A polished stave? It had been fashioned and grooved.... It was a Ray
rod.
If I had doubted my mission I ceased to do so in
that moment. I felt along the weapon in the darkness, from the brass guard,
which stood up, leaving the button unprotected, to the little glass bulb near
the head, through which the destroying Ray would stream. I raised the Ray rod
and aimed it.
The solar light moved in the vault, and the shadow
cast by the wall went back and forth as Sanson tramped to and fro. He was
muttering to himself. He passed across the gap, and the little light shone on
me. But he did not look toward me, and then he was behind the wall again and
the light vanished.
Next time he passed I would fire. Yet I did not fire,
and back and forth, and forth and back he tramped, talking to himself as any
lesser man might have done. I had no compunction at all; I would have killed
him as I would have killed a deadly snake; and yet, so diabolical was the
fascination he exercised over me, I could not press the button.
I gathered my resolution together. I would fire
when he passed the gap again. No, the next time. Well, the next, then. My
fingers tightened on the handle. I saw Sanson emerge, the spark of light in his
hand. The tight, white tunic was in the center of the gap. Now! I pressed the
button, aiming at his heart.
The glass of the Ray rod grew fiery red. The
button seared my hand, and a smell of charred wood filled my nostrils. I
dropped the weapon, and it fell clattering to the ground. Sanson was standing
in the gap, unharmed.
My Ray rod was the one that I had unwittingly
discharged on the occasion when I scrambled for the cellar roof. It had given
me life then; it seemed now to have brought me death. Of course it was useless
till it had been recharged; now it emitted only the red-mull rays: heat, not
cold combustion.
Sanson had halted as I aimed. Now, at the sound of
the falling Ray rod he sprang forward and turned his solar light on me. His
poise was a crouching leopard’s. In his left hand he held the light, and in his
right was his own Ray rod, covering me.
I looked at him, I stared at him, I rose upon my
feet and staggered to him. Something in his poise, the whitening hair, brushed
back, something in the man’s soul that the years could not conceal reminded
me.... I stood looking into the face of Herman Lazaroff!
CHAPTER XIX - THE STORY OF THE
CYLINDERS
“So it was you, Arnold,” said Sanson quietly.
“Well ... what do you think of Sir Spofforth’s theories now?”
All my hatred and fear of him had died in that
blinding revelation. Bewilderment so intense that it made all which had
occurred since my awakening dim, a sense of pathos and futility at once
deprived me of my fears and robbed him of his power; and we might have been the
fellow-workers of the old days again, discussing the problem of consciousness.
He seated himself on the mud mound, and his voice
was as casual as if we had just returned to the laboratory after escorting
Esther home. And indeed I could with great difficulty only convince myself that
I had not fallen asleep and dreamed this nightmare.
“You see, it has all come to pass, Arnold,” said
Sanson, twirling the Ray rod idly between his fingers. “A world such as I
foretold—a world set free. Enlightenment where there was ignorance; the soul
delusion banished from the minds of all but the most foolish; the menace of the
defective still with us, but greatly shrunken; the logical State so wonderfully
conceived by Wells, with Science supreme, and almost a world citizenship. It is
a glorious free world, Arnold, to which humanity has fallen heir, and the fight
for it has been a stupendous one. And it is a world of my creation! I have done
what Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon failed to do; I have brought humanity under
one sway, out of the darkness into light, out of ignorance to knowledge. I have
set man, poor plantigrade, on his feet firmly. He looks up to the skies, not in
the blind and foolish hope of bodiless immortality, but knowing himself the
free heir of the ages. Wasn’t it worth the battle, Arnold?”
My sense of pity deepened. Surely there can be no
worse fate for any man than to accomplish his desires! I thought of all the
unknown idealists who had given their lives to the accomplishment of great
projects and failed, achieving nothing—inventors, dreamers, a gray, fantasmal
legion whose lost hopes ranged back from age to age; and I saw how their works
were blessed and their failures glorified in contrast.
“Yes, I thought that it must be you as soon as I
examined the sheets from the Strangers’ Bureau,” continued Sanson, in his
matter-of-fact manner. But it seemed so incredible that the cylinder had erred
that I allowed my pressing duties to let me forget my impulse to take immediate
action. Unfortunately, while we were fellow-workers I did not take your finger
prints, but I had, of course, observed your characteristic indexes, and also,
if you remember, you were kind enough to my fad to permit me to take your
cranial measurements. I did not think that there could exist two heads like
yours, combined with those indexes, within a single century. For your occipital
region is excellent, approximating my norm, while your frontal area is that of
a moron. In short, you are a typical Grade 2 defective, Arnold—essentially so;
and I have no doubt that, thanks to your five centimeters of asymmetrical
frontal development, you have emerged into this universe of reality still
clinging fondly and affectionately to your dualistic soul theory.
“But never mind!” he continued, smiling rather
grimly. “I have no intention of handing you over to Lembken’s ridiculous
priests to be tried for heresy. There will be no more priests after a little
while. The public mind is now ripe enough for the abolition of this stupid
compromise of the transition period from God to Matter. One more animist will
do little harm in a world in which they are still far from uncommon. And then,
I am not a man of cruel impulses, Arnold, and I do not want to penalize you for
having come into a world in which you are an anachronism. So you have spent
three weeks in London?” he ended, scrutinizing me sharply.
“Yes.”
“And came back by night to see your birthplace, I
suppose,” he said maliciously. “I don’t know how you escaped the battleplanes.
Unless they are growing slack.... I found one scoutplane without its
searchlight working, and shall send its commander to the leather vats if I
discover him ... well, Arnold,” he resumed, “I could not believe that you had
come out of your cylinder before your time. You came within an ace of
disrupting my work, my world, if you only knew it—you with your missing five
centimeters! I put implicit faith in Jurgensen’s mechanism, and, as it proves,
I was to blame. I came here tonight to see if you could really be gone.”
“You knew that I was here?”
“Why not, Arnold, since I put you here?” he
returned, looking at me in a quizzical manner. “I have paid you periodical
visits during the last five and thirty years. You looked charming in your
sleep, Arnold! The fact is, it was a difficult situation. There was no way of
destroying you, even if I had been so minded. I might have buried you ten feet
underground, or thrown you into the sea, I suppose, but the men who moved you
would have betrayed me unless I murdered them—in short, it was a problem how to
dispose of you without violating my naturally humane impulses. So I did the
best thing—covered the cylinder with mud and let you lie here.
“That Jurgensen timepiece was splendidly
contrived, Arnold,” he continued. “Too splendidly, in fact, for in the haste of
sealing you I left the pointer six months ahead of time, as well as with
Esther. It has perhaps occurred to you that you went to sleep in June and awoke
in December?”
It had not occurred to me, but I made no answer to
his sneering question.
“In fact, Jurgensen gave me a six months’ leeway
on his hundred-years clock, and the complication of figures prevented me from
discovering it. I moved the pointer to the end of the dial, assuming that the
last point was a hundred, and not a hundred and a half. And then, Arnold, there
was another most regrettable mistake. You remember that you were sealed up
quickly, and rather impulsively, so to say? I found that, in hurriedly capping
you down, I forgot entirely to add twenty-four days upon the smaller dial for
the leap-years; and so you returned that much ahead of Esther. It was a very
bungled arrangement excusable in you, but not in me.”
“Lazaroff!” I began, and then corrected myself
with an apology as I saw his brows contract. “Sanson—”
“Thank you,” he replied ironically.
“You will at least answer two or three questions,
will you not?” I pleaded. “How did you induce Esther to enter the second
cylinder? Why did you trick me? And how have you contrived to outlive the
century without appearing more than half your age? I think my questions
pardonable.”
“I shall answer them all,” said Sanson. “I may
tell you that it was never my plan to send our monkeys ahead of us into this
world. I meant to go, Arnold. But unexpectedly there came into my life
something against which I had made no provision. In other words, absurd as it
sounds, I fell in love. Then I planned to take Esther with me. But this plan,
too, was changed, for, to be quite frank, I gathered that she preferred you to
me. I then conceived the entertaining idea of taking you both with me, so that
our rivalry might be renewed in a world where your advantages of personality
would be counterbalanced by my power. Arnold, I never for an instant doubted
that I should stand where I stand today. So, having persuaded you to enter the
cylinder—and how I laughed at your imbecile complaisance—I invited Esther to
follow you. There was no difficulty. On the contrary, she could hardly be
convinced that I was in earnest. However, I speedily convinced her by the simple
process of putting on the cap. Then, since the cylinders can be manipulated
from within, I myself entered the third.”
“You, Sanson!” I gasped. “You, too, have slept a
hundred years?”
His look became envenomed, and the quick gust of
passion that came upon him was, to my mind, evidence of a mentality unbalanced
by unrestrained authority.
“Arnold,” he cried, “would you believe that an end
so carefully planned, so mastered in each detail, could be thwarted by an
instant’s lack of balance? You remember that, of the three cylinders, one was
already set a century ahead? That, save for the six months’ leeway that existed
on all the dials, and was, therefore, immaterial—that one, calculated to the
utmost nicety, leap-years and all, was the one I had selected for myself
already. That was the one Esther entered. The dial upon the second cylinder I
set in your presence, but omitted the four and twenty days. That was your
cylinder. And the third—mine—do you remember?—was set to sixty-five.
“I removed this cylinder to a second vault of
which you do not know. I awoke in 1980. Arnold, I entered it and forgot the
dial! When I recovered strength—and I had supplied some food products to last
me during that brief period of recovery—I hurried to this vault. I found only
your cylinder, behind the fallen bricks. When I saw that you still slept I
thought your mechanism had gone wrong. Then, going back to examine my cylinder,
I realized the truth. I, who had loved Esther with all my power, and vowed with
all my will to win her, I, a young man of twenty-five, must wait for five and
thirty years before she awakened. When my time came to claim her I would be
old. O, Esther, what I have endured during these years!”
The baffled love of half a life-span overcame him.
I watched him, almost as shaken. The tyrant of half the world, greater than any
man had been since the days when the Caesars reigned, he had bound himself to a
more awful law than any he could contrive. It wrung my heart even then, the
man’s grim hopes and long enduring love, checked by so slight a chance.
“I found Esther was gone,” continued Sanson
presently, rising and beginning to pace the vault. “I might have re-entered my
cylinder, but I did not know whether she survived in hers. I knew my ambitions
claimed me, and my duty to save humanity and raise it up from the ape. Even she
had to yield to that sacred and pitiful impulse. I learned soon that the
cylinder which contained her had been discovered and adopted as a symbol of
freedom. I found the world aflame and flung myself into the heart of the
revolution. By will I made myself the master of men. In six months my dominance
was unquestioned. I could have become supreme, but I chose to work through
others, that I might have the leisure to devote myself to my plans for the
regeneration of man. I have succeeded; I have made the world better, Arnold,
and I have made it free. But now, when at last the reward of my long toil approaches,
when at last I can show Esther what I have achieved for her, and lay the world
at her feet, I am an old man, and the prize has turned to ashes.”
His grief conquered him again, and he paced the
vault like a madman, weeping with all the abandonment of one who is above the
need of conventional repressions. I remembered the antics of the crowd that followed
me to the court. Sanson’s grief was as unrestrained as their malice. But I was
brought back from pity by the realization of this new and dreadful
complication. Sanson loved Esther still. And he had worked for her. I recalled
her immature feminist views. He had believed her youthful impatience of
authority rested upon as firm a conviction as his beliefs! He thought he had
freed humanity. And all the uncountable wrongs of earth had been heaped up by
him as a love-offering to lay at Esther’s feet.
I flung my prudence away. I clasped him by the
hands.
Sanson,” I pleaded, “don’t you see, don’t you
understand what the world is today? Each age has its own cruelties and wrongs;
but, if poverty has been abolished, have you not set a heavier yoke upon men’s
necks? Their children torn from them, the death-house for the old, the
vivisection table—”
“That is all true, Arnold,” he answered, “and
sometimes, even now, that old, inherited weakness that men termed conscience
stirs in me. That fatal atavistic folly!—for what is death, after all? A
painless end, a placid journey into nothingness, a resolution of the material
atoms into new forms, which shall, in turn, create that consciousness men used
to term a soul. Their children? Bah! Arnold, through suffering we win upward.
In the world-nation that is to come, the narrow, selfish instinct called
parental love—a trick of Nature to ensure the rearing of the race—will not
exist. It will have served its purpose. All I have done is nothing in
comparison with the great secret now almost within my grasp. That is the
meaning of the vivisection table—the research work that will enable me to offer
man immortality!”
I recoiled in horror at the sight of the fearful
fanaticism upon his face.
“Yes, it is that, Arnold, which I am almost ready
to bestow upon the world!” he cried triumphantly. “The old problem of
consciousness and tissue life on which we worked so long has practically been
solved by means at my disposal in a civilized world. Then we shall live indeed.
There will be no requirement that knowledge should progress painfully through
the inheritance of our fathers’ labors. We ourselves shall climb the ladder of
omniscience. The fit shall live forever, and we shall weed out the moron and
defective without scruple, preserving a race of mortal slaves to labor for us
in the factories and in the fields, holding them subdued by the threatened loss
of that life which we shall control and permit to them so long as they are
obedient. That is the noble climax of man’s aspirations. Immortal life, in
these bodies of ours, and Esther mine, not for a span, but for eternity!”
I believed him—I could not help but believe. Can
anything be impossible, so long as man is gifted with free will for good and
evil? Must he not have the ladder to scale Olympus, and thereby learn of
heights beyond? I flung myself upon my knees before Sanson, like some poor
father pleading for his son’s life, and implored him to draw back. As he stood
watching me I babbled about the terror in the world, the boon of death, the
long-linked chain of humanity, bound all together as a spiritual unit, which he
would sever. I reminded him of the old days under Sir Spofforth, of the old,
free world we had lost. How had he bettered it? I think I moved him, too,
though, when I ended, he was regarding me with a cold smile of negation.
“You want me to turn back, Arnold,” he said. “Once
there was a time when I hesitated. But ... can even that God of yours turn
back? Come with me, Arnold, and for the sake of the old friendship to which you
have appealed I will give you power. Defective as you are, you shall live your
life to the full capacity of your
talent. You shall not suffer because you came so unkindly into this world of
ours. If your mind turns toward pleasures such as that foul defective Lembken
enjoys, they shall be yours. If not, then you shall work with me as you used to
do. When I and Esther rule the world together, immortal as the fabled gods, you
shall sit at our feet and be our confidant.”
That I hoped still to win Esther had never entered
the man’s mind. The sublimity of his egotism was the measure of his blindness.
Just as he had entered the cellar, so self-absorbed that he had failed to see
the benches and the crucifix, nor dreamed that here, where his evil dreams began,
their end was planned, so, now, he did not see. The devilish will that had
carried him thus far would bring him to destruction.
At my hands, if I played the part shrewdly. But I
lost all self-command.
“Though you have all the world at your feet, Sanson,”
I cried, “you can never hold me to obedience, nor Esther either. I love her,
and we shall both die before we yield!”
For an instant I saw his face before me, twisted
with all the passions of his thwarted will; then I saw the blinding white light
leap from his Ray rod as he fired at me.
