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Title: World atavism
Author: Edmond Hamilton
Release date: June 17, 2024 [eBook #73857]
Language: English
Original publication: Jamaica, NY: Experimenter Publications Inc, 1930
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORLD ATAVISM ***
World Atavism
By Edmond Hamilton
_Author of "The Universe Wreckers,"
"The Other Side of the Moon," etc._
Illustrated by PAUL
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories August 1930.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
_The sun's rays have been credited with many beneficial powers.
It is a universally conceded fact that the sun is necessary to
good health; not only because of its warmth-giving rays, but also
because of some other element, directly a health-giving factor,
which has since been more or less successfully duplicated in the
laboratory--in the form of Alpine lamps and what not. It is also
said, however, that there are certain properties in the rays of the
sun which might be used as life-giving rays. As far as we know,
nothing definite has been established on this score yet. Who knows
what other helpful possibilities are hidden in the various ether
vibrations produced by the sun? Edmond Hamilton has a brand new
idea, which he elaborates and weaves into a fascinating story of
scientific fiction. Certainly it seems to us to be of absorbing
interest._
FOREWORD
I write these words in a room perched high in one of New York's highest
towers. Beneath me, in the fading sunlight of late afternoon, there
stretches the vast mass of the mighty city's structures. New York it
is--but such a New York as never man looked upon before. And it is with
its familiar but infinitely strange panorama before my eyes that I
start now this record of the great change.
* * * * *
My name is Allan Harker. Dr. Allan Harker, I could say, for it has
been seven years since I took the degree and with it a position on the
biological staff of Manhattan University. That was a great day for me.
Manhattan was one of the most renowned of eastern universities, and its
biological department in particular was known to scientists the world
over. This was due not only to the department's unrivalled equipment,
but also in greater part to two of the scientists who worked in it,
Dr. Howard Grant, head of the department, and Dr. Raymond Ferson, his
associate. Very proud I was to have won so soon the opportunity of
working with those two world-famed biologists. And even prouder I was
when, in the next years, my work came gradually to link my name with
theirs.
Grant and Ferson and Harker--we were known to scientists across half
the world. It was Grant, of course, the eldest of us, who was best
known. A tall, saturnine-faced and dark-browed Scotsman, his utter
and undivided passion for research was a byword among us. It used to
be said, though not in his hearing, that Grant would have vivisected
his own grandmother if he thought some new principle might be learned
by it. All respected the man, or the man's achievements, but he never
had a tithe of the popularity that was Ferson's. Ferson was in fact
a complete contrast to his superior, a short-statured man of middle
age with unruly hair and beard and warm brown, friendly eyes. As for
myself, the third of the trio, I had neither the brilliant scientific
mind of Grant nor the keen vision of Ferson, but by dint of ceaseless
plodding with monotonous details, I had built for myself a reputation
that linked my name with theirs.
Aside from our professorial duties in the university's lecture-rooms,
we had each of us our separate work. I was plodding away with my dull
experiments on cell-grouping, which I expected would some day yield a
theory that would astound all cytologists. Now and then I received help
on some difficult point from Ferson, who was himself immersed in an
attempt to demolish the Snelsen-Morrs re-vertebration theory by prying
into the interior structure of innumerable unheard-of lizards. Grant,
however, never received or gave any help, keeping his work entirely to
himself. We had gathered, from his rare references to it, that he had
been working for months on one of the broader problems of evolutionary
science, but that was all we knew, and we were as amazed as any
when Grant published the statement that touched off the sensational
"evolution controversy."
It is needless for me to give here all the details of the thing. It is
sufficient to say that Grant, in his statement, announced that he had
solved at last the greatest enigma of biological science--that he had
discovered the cause of evolution.
One can understand what an uproar that statement created, and was bound
to create. For the cause of evolutionary change has always been the
supreme problem of biology. Long ago Darwin and Wallace and Lamarck and
their fellows had laid the processes of evolution bare. They had shown
to an astonished world that life on earth was not static in forms that
had always existed and always would exist, but that it was in constant
change and movement up through constantly changing forms. The eohippus
had changed, had evolved into the horse, and in future ages would be
something different still. The great felines that had roamed earth had
evolved into smaller forms and into tame cats. A certain branch of
ape-like forms had evolved into great hairy troglodytes and then into
modern men. All life on earth was constantly changing, evolving, forced
ever upward through the diverging channels of evolution into new and
different forms.
But what force was it that pressed earth's life thus upward through
the paths of change? What force was it that caused all this vast, slow
evolution of earth's creatures into different creatures, that had
begun with the first jelly-like life-forms on earth and had forced
the tide of life up from them to the forms of today, that still was
slowly changing them? That question none could answer. Environment
did not explain it, for though environment had certain effects on the
life-forms in it, it was not responsible for that deep, vast tide
of upward evolution. Mendelism had seemed for a time to suggest an
explanation but had failed in the end to do so. Some great force there
was, all knew, that pressed life always up the path of evolution, but
none had ever guessed what that force might be, and the thing had come
to be accepted at last as one of the insoluble problems of science. And
now Grant claimed that he had solved it!
"For long," Grant's statement said, "I have held that since
evolutionary change is unquestionably caused by some definite and
omnipresent force acting upon all life on earth, it should be possible
to discover the nature of that force. I will not recount the work of
months which I have spent in constant search for this force, but will
say that finally I have been successful, have identified the force
which my experiments show beyond all doubt to be the single force
responsible for the upward course of evolution on earth. That force is
a vibratory force, a vibration unknown to earth's physicists prior to
my discovery of it, which has as its source the sun!
"The sun, we know, is a vast mass of incandescent matter which
ceaselessly pours out part of its matter transformed into energy. The
energy thus formed, flooding out in all directions from the sun through
space, takes various forms. At a certain vibratory frequency, it takes
the form of light and illuminates our day. At another frequency, it is
radiant heat, warming our world. At still another, it is the cosmic
ray so recently discovered. There are many others, known to us, and
still more of which we know nothing as yet, a vast welter of vibratory
forces flooding endlessly outward from the sun. And it is one of those
vibrations, one which we well may call the evolution vibration, which
is responsible for the evolutionary change of all life on earth.
"In this there is nothing astounding. The sun's various vibratory
forces affect all living things on earth profoundly, each in a
different manner. Without the light-vibrations earth's life would fade
and die, the absence of the ultra-violet waves being fatal in time.
Without its heat-radiations all life would freeze. And without this
evolution vibration playing ceaselessly upon earth, all life upon earth
would no longer be pressed upward through the paths of evolution, would
slip back swiftly down those paths, down the myriad roads up which it
has surged for so long. For not only is it this evolution vibration
that forces earth's life upward on the way of change, it is this
vibration that keeps earth's life from slipping backward!"
Thus for Grant's statement. To Ferson and me it was as astonishing as
to the rest of the scientific world, for not until then did we learn
what work it was that had occupied Grant for so long. Yet even we two,
I think, were surprised at the sensation that that statement caused.
Always the work of Dr. Grant had been accepted almost without question,
so great was his reputation and so brilliant his achievements. But with
the publication of this amazing new theory of his, the general dislike
of the man that had always lain latent, burst forth into a storm of
criticism.
It was admitted that the new vibratory force which Grant had discovered
did apparently exist, since other scientists working on his data had
corroborated his work on it. But it was denied, by Grant's numerous
critics, that this force was what he claimed it to be--the cause of
evolutionary change. It was impossible, they stated, that such a
so-called evolution vibration could in reality be responsible for the
course of evolution on earth. And it was even more absurd to suggest
as Grant had done that were that force withdrawn, were the evolution
vibration to cease to play on earth from the sun, the living beings of
earth would slip swiftly backward on the road of change.
The controversy over the thing grew, in fact, to a point of bitterness
unprecedented in scientific discussion, a bitterness intensified by
the comments of the saturnine and black-tempered Grant. In a series of
sardonic statements, he compared his critics to those who had derided
the work of Darwin and his fellows, and indulged in some rather acrid
personalities. These in turn provoked fiercer attacks, and the whole
matter grew thus quickly into an unseemly intellectual brawl. To Ferson
and myself the whole controversy seemed a useless one, because, in the
course of time, experimentation by other scientists would definitely
prove or disprove Grant's theory. Yet neither of us ventured to suggest
that to our bitter superior, and so the wrangle grew in intensity in
the next days until it suddenly came to a head.
It was the elderly President Rogers of Manhattan University who brought
the thing to a focus. He and the university's other officials had
been growing more and more restive under the criticisms that Grant's
controversy was bringing on the school, and so at last he suggested
that a meeting be held at which Grant could lay his theories and data
before his fellow-scientists in their entirety. This Grant accepted,
and so too did most biologists of any note within traveling distance
of New York, so widely had the clamor of the dispute spread. And on an
afternoon Grant rose before several hundred assembled scientists in one
of the university's lecture-halls to explain his discovery.
There is little need for me to tell at length of what took place
at that meeting, which both Ferson and I attended. At the first
appearance of Dr. Grant his enemies in the audience grew vocal in
their criticisms, and before he had spoken a quarter of an hour the
hall was in such an uproar as a scientific meeting has seldom heard.
Twice Grant made an effort to go on and each time his voice was drowned
by a storm of shouted cries. The President, chairman of the meeting,
was rapping vainly for order, but Grant only stood still, looking out
over the stormy meeting with a cold contempt in his eyes, yet with a
strange fire in them. Quietly he rolled up the data-sheets in his hand
and thrust them into his pocket, and as quietly stepped forward to the
platform's edge. Something in his bearing, in his expression, quickly
quieted the noisy throng before him.
His voice came out over the hall cold and clear. "You have not let me
give to you the proof for which you asked," he said.
The President stepped to his side, said something rapidly, but Grant
shook his head calmly. "No proof that I can give you here would
convince you of my theory's truth, I know," he told the silent throng
before him, "but I will give you proof of it yet! To you, and to the
world, I will give a proof such as the world has never seen before!"
Before any could move, he had walked from the platform and out of the
hall. A buzz of excited voices broke out instantly, in comment and
criticism. It was some hours later before Ferson and I got from the
meeting to Grant's laboratory. But Grant was not there.
Within twenty-four hours more we knew, and all at the university
knew, that Dr. Grant had disappeared. From the meeting he went to his
laboratory, burned some papers there and pocketed others. Then he went
to his rooms, hastily packed a few bags and departed. He left no note,
no message. His action brought to a climax the whole sensation of the
controversy he had precipitated and Grant's going was taken by many
of his critics as a confession of the falsity of his position. He had
had no close relatives to start a search for him, and though to Ferson
and me his strange departure seemed astounding, we could explain it no
better than others. The sensation subsided, and Ferson was appointed to
head the department in place of the vanished scientist. Our own work
occupied us once more. And certainly neither Ferson nor I, any more
than another, guessed what lay behind Grant's strange action.
* * * * *
It was six months after Grant's departure that the great change began.
The first intimation was brought to the public notice by a New York
newspaper. In a sensational article entitled "Is a New Crime Wave Upon
Us?" it pointed out that in the last few days an unprecedented number
of crimes of violence had taken place.
These were the more appalling in that many seemed quite without motive.
In New York alone, in those few days, there had been more than a dozen
murders, mostly clubbings and stabbings, which had apparently been
provoked by the slightest of causes. In Chicago a respected clerk of
middle age had for some annoyance turned suddenly and fractured the
skulls of three of his associates with a heavy bar. From San Francisco
and Los Angeles had come news of half a dozen holocausts in which one
member of a family had slaughtered or attempted to slaughter all the
others. From every part of the land there were coming reports of the
most horrifying crimes of violence, the great majority of which seemed
inspired by the pettiest of causes.
And this same wave of homicidal mania seemed at work over all the
world! It was as though hundreds in earth's population had suddenly had
their reason dwarfed and their passions magnified. No less than three
solid householders in London had run amuck in bursts of sadistic[1]
fury that had cost a half-score lives. The Paris police had taken from
the Seine more human bodies, many terribly mutilated, than had ever
been found in it in a like time before. Germany was aghast over two
mass-murders of unexampled fiendishness that had occurred in a Rhenish
and a Silesian village. There was news of an even more terrible slaying
in Calcutta, and word of murders almost as terrible from almost every
country on the globe.
[Footnote 1: Sadism, of which this word is the adjective, is a mental
perversion towards cruelty.]
Nor was it murder alone that was stalking the earth, for robberies of
the utmost brutality were even more numerous. Overshadowed as they
were by the greater horror, they were as astonishing in nature. For
all, like the slayings, seemed the result of sudden brutal instincts
or desires uncontrolled by reason. Small shopkeepers in American and
English towns were struck down for trifles. In the stores of great
cities there were those who snatched childishly at desired objects and
attempted a hopeless escape to the street. That was the keynote of all
these robberies, of all these crimes--the unreasoning childishness of
them. For the great part of them were attempted under circumstances
which should have shown to even the most dull-witted that there was no
chance of success.
It was a wave of strange and terrible crime, indeed, that was sweeping
over all the earth. The newspapers concerned themselves with it to the
exclusion of all else soon. They sought for explanations. What had
caused this sudden release of the most brutal passions of numberless
people? Many were the answers. An eminent scientist declared that the
nerve-racking strain of modern civilization had reached such a pitch
that the human mind could no longer stand it, was giving way beneath
it. Many wrote serious letters to the press denouncing the motion
pictures as schools of crime. Others defended them. And while the cause
was thus argued, the great wave of crime and utter lawlessness that had
rolled across earth seemed increasing in volume.
The number of deaths by violence that were each day recorded had grown
now to an appalling figure. Murderous attacks were common in every one
of earth's great cities. Men hurled themselves at each other's throats,
apparently for a word, a gesture. Nor was this all. A strange erratic
insanity seemed seizing more and more of earth's millions. Numberless
were those reported to the authorities as missing, those who had
wandered causelessly away from home and family. The world's roads held
an unprecedented number of vagrant wanderers.
But in a few days more even this astounding wave of appalling crime was
dwarfed in importance by more astounding and more terrible happenings.
Accidents, a great number of them fatal to many, were occurring in
every part of earth in an amount that was all but incredible.
More than a hundred people had gone to death in the crash of two
thundering passenger trains in Colorado, a crash that had been due
to the failure of an engineer to heed the plainest of signals. Two
train wrecks in northern England had taken a toll of life almost as
great, and there were reports of many other crashes from various parts
of earth. In every one the accident had been due to the inexplicable
failure of the human element, the failure of dispatcher or switchman or
engineer to perform the duty that habit should have made automatic. In
one case, that of the Austrian disaster, the crash had been directly
caused by the sudden craziness of a switchman, who, for some slight
grievance, had sent a long passenger-train crashing through an open
switch and down an embankment.
There was news as terrible from the seas. Wireless reports flashed
thick with word of ships that had blundered fatally on rocks or shoals
by fault of helmsman or navigating officer. The greater part of these,
fortunately, were freight-ships of medium and small size, but one case
sent a thrill of horror through earth, already steeped in horror. That
was when the great transatlantic liner _Garonia_, bound to Southampton,
crashed by night into the southern Irish coast with the resulting loss
of three-fourths of the thousand humans it carried. And that wreck,
like the others, was due to an utterly inexplicable failure of the
ship's personnel.
Smaller in magnitude, but taking a total of far more lives, were the
unnumbered accidents that took place in the thickly populated and
highly mechanized countries of North America and Europe. The number of
automobile deaths, always staggering America, reached a stunning total
in those last fateful days of September. Crashes took place at every
corner, and the running down of pedestrians became a common occurrence
everywhere. Many cars mowed a path of death through street and sidewalk
before they were halted, their drivers losing apparently all faculty of
control of them.
And in mill and shop and factory death's grim hand was reaping as
thickly. Men, upon whom the lives of many depended, suddenly lost
control of their machines and sent those many to death. Countless
others were mangled or crushed to death by the great mechanisms they
had operated for years without mishaps. Airplane crashes became so
numerous that many sections of the world peremptorily forbade all
further flying until the cause of it all could be ascertained. It was
as though more and more of the masses of men were becoming incapable of
handling the mechanisms, of conducting the operations, that they had
been executing for years. Was mankind going collectively insane?
It seemed insanity, indeed, that was sweeping earth now. Riots had
taken place on a small scale here and there in those days, but it
was not until after the first of October that the first of the great
outbreaks took place in London. Crowds of wandering men and women
began the looting of shops, the breaking of windows, and the rioting
swiftly spread. So swiftly did it spread, in fact, that by the time
the troops called to suppress it appeared on the scene, unestimated
thousands were engaged in the wild search for plunder. At the order to
fire, an irregular volley from the troops killed scores, but in the
pitched mob battle that followed scores of the soldiers took the side
of the looters. The combat between mob and soldiers was forgotten,
and the battle became a wild scene of brutality and violence in which
hundreds were slain and trampled. In the end it required machine-guns
to disperse them.
A similar great outbreak in New York was curbed quickly a day later
by the use of planes and tear-bombs, but two days after there came
a huge riot of unexampled bloodiness in Chicago, which cost several
thousand lives and which resulted in the burning of a third of the
city. Beginning as a race riot and developing into a savage general
battle for loot, it was notable for the fact that the troops, called to
suppress it, broke up even before they reached the scene and occupied
themselves in brutal looting and battle of their own. And a score of
great riots in the other cities of earth had similar results.
Civilization seemed crashing, with this oncoming dissolution of its
organization and institutions. Had humanity gone insane, indeed?
Swiftly, with full realization of the peril upon it by then, a
conference of the world's most noted scientists had been called some
days before at New York, to explain and to halt, if possible, this wave
of seeming insanity that was gripping more of the masses of humanity
each day and that was disintegrating civilization.
But when those scientists met, the world learned that they had a
hundred different explanations of the thing, no two agreeing. The
famous American alienist who had voiced his opinion days before
reiterated his belief that the minds of men were giving way _en masse_
beneath the strain of modern civilization. A Rumanian bacteriologist
claimed that the thing was the result of a contagious new brain disease
spreading over earth, and claimed even to have isolated the bacterium
of that disease. The scientists, gripped seemingly by something of
the erratic condition of mind they were striving to explain, argued
these theories and others with utmost passion, sometimes attacking
each other. An English physicist, who suggested that earth was passing
through strange mind-affecting gases in space, was assaulted by the
proponent of another theory. And still more furious and incredulous,
the world learned, was the reception given to the explanation of a New
York biologist named Ferson, who claimed that the whole great terror
was the result of the human races slipping backward on the road of
evolution!
"World atavism! A throwback of all the world's life on the road of
evolution!" So, they learned, Ferson had cried to the assembled
scientists. "All earth's animal life is beginning to slip back, and
man, as the most recently developed animal, is slipping first, is going
back toward the savage state, toward the cave-man or troglodyte, toward
the ape! He is losing control of his passions as he goes back, which
accounts for the violence that now fills earth! And he is losing the
mental capacity of modern man, which accounts for his inability to
operate longer our modern machines! A world atavism that is beginning
with the atavism of the human races!"
"But what could cause such world atavism as that?" the incredulous
scientists had cried.
"The evolutionary theory of my former associate, Dr. Grant----" Ferson
had begun, but was interrupted by a chorus of derisive shouts provoked
by the mention of the scientist whose ridiculous theory had been
exploded.
So Ferson had been forced from the meeting by the furious scientists,
who seemed seized indeed with the erratic craziness that was gripping
the world. Another day they advanced and argued their theories,
theories that grew ever more impossible, more incoherent, and then
the meeting dissolved in a general riotous brawl of the arguing
scientists. They, in common with the rest of the races of men, seemed
incapable longer of calm thought, of cool, unpassioned reasoning.
Two were killed, throttled in the brawl that ended the meeting, and
the rest scattered. They were not followed or punished, for now the
disintegration of humanity's institutions had become such that crime
was unheeded.
Men were outrivalling each other in mad action. Those in high places
as in low were gripped by the insanity that had apparently seized
earth, and from the Cabinets and Congresses of a score of nations came
declarations of war against other nations, for the slightest of reasons
or for none at all. England, the United States, France, Germany, Italy,
Turkey, Japan and China--these and a dozen others issued frenzied and
incoherent calls to arms. But they were unheeded! Even war now could
not penetrate the unreasoning minds of men. Armies had broken up, all
discipline and organization vanishing. A few who tried to keep their
soldiers in line found that the men could no longer handle the great
guns and instruments of war, found that most of them were incapable of
the operation of rifles!
Civilization was crashing with a prolonged roar of falling laws and
institutions and customs echoing across the world. The ordinary methods
of transportation and production having completely broken down days
before, the stream of food into the great cities had abruptly ceased.
The brutal throngs that filled those cities subsisted by looting the
existing food supplies for a time, but soon these were exhausted
and then terrible battles took place between the rioters for food
which they had found. Battles they were of hordes of ragged brutes,
of savages, who fought with knives or with their bare hands in the
streets. Only occasionally was a shot heard, for almost none there was
now with sufficient dull glimmer of intelligence to manipulate a gun.
In the shadow of the tall towers of New York, and in the brick and
stone acres of London and the boulevards of Paris, thousands and
hundreds of thousands of these savages swarmed, the ways choked with
corpses of the slain. At night they crouched fearfully in hallways and
offices and corridors, the vast cities lying dark and silent beneath
the stars. Shapes of prowling animals were being seen in some of them
by night. No wheel turned in all the world now, for none seemed left
with intelligence enough to operate the simplest machine.
And these swarms that had been human were changing in appearance too.
The men were unshaven and hairier, it seemed. Much clothing had been
discarded, crude belts that held knives or the like weapons being
retained. They crouched now as they walked, their step a watchful,
animal-like one. From under shaggy brows they stared at each other.
Small, crude family-groups held together, the man battling other men
for the possession of food. Some managed to kill animals, and wore the
skins.
They were troglodytes, millions of them, men such as the world had
seen thousands of years before, as humanity had been then. They
were troglodytes, wandering through the cities and towns that they
themselves had built, staring in wondering fear about them at things
the purpose of which they could not understand. But most had no wonder,
only a brutal lack of interest in all save food and mating and sleep.
There were no fires, for all had lost the use of fire and feared it now.
Driven by hunger, great masses of them were pouring out of the cities
into the countryside, to hunt roots and herbs and to kill small animals
for food. They made rude shelters for a time, then abandoned them for
caves and crannies in the rocks. They ceased to use knives or spears,
they could but throw great stones at each other or wield chance clubs,
or fight with bare hands.
Many had remained in the cities and among them was more fighting. With
each day they were changing farther, it seemed, going farther back
along the long road of change that man had ascended so slowly through
the ages, and that he was slipping back upon so swiftly.
The streets of New York and Glasgow and Constantinople and Yokohama saw
them, these animal-like, ape-like hordes that wandered there. Ape-like
they were becoming, indeed, swiftly hairier of body, more crouching
of gait, stooping occasionally in moving to run on hands and feet.
Clothing they had discarded. The fragmentary, mumbled speech that they
had kept until days before had given way to a meaningless medley of
barking shouts and cries whose tone conveyed their crude attempt at
communication. They roamed the great cities in little groups or tribes,
of each of which one was the strongest, the tyrant, the acknowledged
lord.
And now, they were changing still. Were running more on hands and feet,
walking upright less. Back from man to troglodyte, and from troglodyte
to ape had the human races gone, and now were slipping back still into
the animal races from which the apes had come! World atavism--and it
was wiping the last human-like forms from the face of earth!
* * * * *
Of this great change that in days swept man back into the brutal forms
of dead ages, I, Allan Harker, was a witness from the first. For it was
at New York that the early manifestations of the change had been first
noticed, in that increasing wave of terrible crime that was in days to
rage over the whole earth.
Neither Ferson nor I, of course, had any suspicion of the thing's real
magnitude in those first days. We followed, with the same astonishment
that held most in the world, the astounding growth of crime and
violence, but it was remote from our own interests, and we were both
very much absorbed in our differing work of experimentation. We spent
more time on that work, indeed, in those days than before, for both
Ferson and I seemed to have lost a little of our usual skill and
knowledge. I know that he caught himself in inexplicable lapses, and
I know that I, usually the most patient of biologists, forgot myself
in sudden impatient rage on one or two occasions and smashed retorts
and test-tubes about me. Neither of us dreamed, of course, that we
were being affected by the same strange forces that were releasing
humanity's passions in a carnival of crime.
But when a little later the great wave of crime that was making
earth hideous was made more terrible by the innumerable inexplicable
accidents that were occurring, Ferson became thoughtful. He deserted
his own white-tiled laboratories for the university's psychological
test-rooms with their strange recording instruments, and spent hours
there carrying out intricate tests of the reactions of himself and
others. It was after two days of such tests, when the fatal accidents
occurring everywhere were taking toll of thousands of lives daily, and
when almost all industrial activity was slowing and stopping because of
them, that Ferson came back, his countenance as I had never seen it.
"I've found it, Allan," he said quietly. "The cause of all this
terror--these innumerable crimes and accidents and riotings."
"The cause of them?" I repeated, uncomprehendingly, and he nodded.
"Yes, and that cause is world atavism! An atavism, a throwback, of
all the world's animal life, that is beginning with man as the most
recently developed animal and that is taking place before our eyes!
Taking place in ourselves even!"
"World atavism!" I gasped. "But, Ferson--that such a thing could
be--it's inconceivable!"
He shook his head. "Not inconceivable. You remember Grant and his
theory, that the evolution vibrations from the sun were what had pushed
earth's life up the road of evolution? And you remember that Grant said
that were those evolution vibrations to cease to reach earth from the
sun, all earth's life would slip swiftly back upon that road?"
"I remember," I said, "but how could such a thing happen? What could
ever halt the play of the sun's evolution vibrations on earth?"
Ferson's eyes were somber. "I do not know what could," he said slowly,
"but I think I know who could!"
"Ferson!" I cried. "You don't for an instant think that Grant----"
"I do think so," he said, his voice steelly. "Grant discovered the
existence of the evolution vibrations--he alone of men knew all
concerning them. Do you remember what he said when they refused to let
him explain his theory even at that meeting? He said: 'I will give you
proof of this. I will give you proof yet of this theory, and such a
proof as the world has never seen before!'"
My mind was reeling. "Then you think that when Grant disappeared--that
he----"
"I think that that great proof that Grant promised in his rage to give
the world is the world atavism that is upon humanity now! I think that
Grant in some inconceivable way has used his knowledge and his power
to deflect or dampen the evolution vibrations coming toward earth from
the sun, and that it is because of the absence of those vibrations that
earth's life is slipping backward!"
"But where will it stop?" I exclaimed.
"It will not stop, Harker--this tremendous change has only begun. Man,
the most recently evolved of all animals, is changing first, and will
go back through troglodyte and ape to the forms before them, back
through changing beast-forms. By then the other animals of earth will
be changing also, thrown back along the evolutionary road, and that
great atavism will continue until earth's life has all changed back
into the first crude protoplasmic forms from which eons ago it sprung!"
"But what can we do?" I cried. "There must be some way of stopping
this!"
"There is only one way," he said. "Grant is causing this great world
atavism, is shutting off the sun's evolution vibrations from earth by
projecting toward the sun, no doubt, a great dampening or neutralizing
vibration that stifles them, annihilates them, at their source. We must
find Grant's whereabouts, must destroy whatever apparatus he is using
to do that!"
"Yet if all are changing--we two also must be changing!" I exclaimed,
and he nodded.
"We two are already a little affected as all men are, more or less.
Our lapses of memory, the difficulties we have in our work now, these
things in the last days are the result of this world atavism in us,
just as the crimes and accidents filling earth are. And we two must
protect ourselves against this tremendous change, whatever we do, for
on us depends the one chance of halting Grant's terrible work. The
world will never believe that that dread work is really going on until
it is too late, so you and I must not change!"
Ferson went swiftly on to explain his idea. This was none other than
to construct two small projectors that would each automatically and
ceaselessly generate artificial evolution vibrations, vibrations
affecting a limited range as the sun's vibrations had affected all
earth. These projectors in their compact cases could be worn on our
bodies by each of us without being noticeable, and would keep each of
us always thus in the range of the vital vibrations, so that we would
not be affected by the world-wide absence of that which was causing
this world atavism. Whatever great dampening wave Grant was sending out
toward the sun to neutralize its evolution vibrations would not, of
course, affect the vibrations of our own little projectors.
The next two days saw us at work upon these projectors. The method of
producing the evolution vibrations we knew, for as I have mentioned,
they had been artificially produced in a small way by physicists upon
Grant's first announcement of his theory. The second day, therefore,
saw our projectors complete, small flat black cases that were strapped
to our belts without being noticeable, each holding the tiny but
marvelously powerful batteries that were the current-source, and the
compact little generator that automatically and unendingly released
the vital evolution vibrations for a range of several feet. With these
completed and working, and secured thus by them from being ourselves
affected by the terrible atavism that was upon the races of man, we
began our greater work of locating Grant and the apparatus by which he
was shutting off the sun's vibrations and loosing this horror on the
earth.
For horror it had now become, and the world was waking up to its
true nature as every sort of brutal passion was released in terrible
crime over it, and as the inexplicable mindlessness of men brought on
terrific accidents. Already a dozen of the greatest governments in
coöperation had called a conference of earth's greatest scientists at
New York to explain or to halt at least the horror that was sweeping
earth. To that conference they came with each a different and more
incredible explanation of the thing, and to it went Ferson and I to
give them the true explanation and to turn them toward the search
for Grant that might yet save humanity. But that explanation was
never given, for Ferson's first mention of world atavism was greeted
with incredulous cries, and when he went on to mention Grant, such
a derisive storm arose, that he was forced bodily from the meeting,
leaving the scientists disputing fiercely over the most impossible of
theories, supporting and opposing those theories by blows.
For they, like the rest of humanity, seemed incapable now of clear and
sustained thought upon any subject. Even Ferson and I, working day and
night in the isolated upper Manhattan laboratories of the university,
were able to see clearly what was happening about us. We were living,
eating, sleeping at the laboratories by this time, for all means of
transportation and all industrial activities were ceasing. Great masses
of men roamed the streets of the city, some forming into gangs that
made life terrible for the others, the rest engaged in indiscriminate
looting. The great London riot and the abortive outbreak in lower New
York had now taken place, and it was evident to all that the last
shadow of law and order in the city was vanishing, for more and more
the troops and police who maintained it were engaging in the rioting
themselves.
News came still a little, in incoherently written and erratically
printed sheets, for a few days, and it was thus we learned of the
huge Chicago riot and subsequent fire. It marked the beginning of the
end. Within a few days more utter lawlessness reigned over New York,
corpses lay in its streets and looters were everywhere. The university
buildings, deserted now by all but ourselves, were not attacked except
on a few occasions by the looting swarms, there being no food or other
desirable things in them, and Ferson and I had rifles and pistols in
our laboratory to repel the ragged and brutal gangs that might attack
us.
In those terrible days we were occupied heart and soul in the work of
locating Grant and whatever mechanism it was by which he was casting
this doom on humanity. It was Ferson's idea that the great damping
wave, which Grant must be sending toward the sun to halt the play
of its endless evolution vibrations, would affect certain recording
instruments, if the correct frequency for their circuits could be
found. Once that was found, by observing the amount by which the
instruments were affected at different locations by the waves of the
great damping vibration, we could calculate and chart that great wave's
source with some degree of accuracy. It seemed to me a very slender
chance, yet I knew as well as did Ferson that it was the one possible
way. Grant, we knew, would have protected himself, as we had, by a
small artificial projector of the vibrations.
So in those fearful days we worked with the recording instruments,
watching them at each new trial for some indication of the force
whose source we sought. The whole great mass of New York's giant
structures that stretched southward and downward from our laboratory
lay now in complete darkness each night; the last wonted activities of
civilization having ceased in it as elsewhere. Ragged hordes of savages
roamed it, savages so hairy and crouching and brutal of face, seeming
each day more prognathous of jaw and slanting of brow and animal-like
of eye, that we knew them to be troglodytes, cave-men, men such as
humanity had been ages before and such as it was over all earth now.
We saw them occasionally prowling through the university grounds in
search of food, shambling toward us with lowering brows to attack us
when they glimpsed us, but fleeing in fear when we fired over their
heads. For none of them could manipulate so complicated a thing as
a firearm. All earth's hundreds of millions were prowling their way
in just such brutal bands, thrown back to the state that had been
man's before history's dawn. And ever more brutal and hairy and
animal-like they were becoming as they slipped back farther still,
back from troglodyte to ape! Mankind was gone, transformed into these
still-changing brutes--all except Ferson and me.
* * * * *
I cannot tell now in full of those terrible last days of change, those
days in which in our chance glimpses we saw men making that other
terrible step backward, from troglodyte to ape. For Ferson and I were
working with the speed of utter despair. Even were Grant's terrible
work to be halted, the sun's evolution vibrations again released on
earth, it would take them untold ages to raise the brute-like beings
about us to the status of men once more. Humanity was passing, had
passed, into the brute around us, yet for their sake, for the sake of
the humanity that might rise again in the dim future, we kept to our
efforts, sought still to halt this awful change, that would otherwise
not stop until protoplasmic slime alone was left living on earth.
We had found the correct frequency for the circuits of our recording
instruments, and in feverish haste set up those instruments at
intervals of a mile, working through the night. The weirdest of work it
was, the vast city's streets and structures silent in the night around
us, the countless hordes of brute-like beings that once had built
them now cowering in the buildings in ape-like fear of the night's
mysteries. We took our readings, hastened back to our laboratory, and
dawn found us marking those readings on the great chart-map of the
section we had ready. Somewhere in that section, somewhere near New
York, we knew, Grant lurked with his terrible mechanism, our first
readings having shown us that. And now, as with trembling hands Ferson
and I drew the graphs on the big chart, we stared for a moment after in
complete silence.
Those lines converged at a point in a midtown block of the great city
south of us, a block occupied by a single gigantic building whose
aspiring tower was in sight of our laboratory's windows!
For moments Ferson and I stared from chart to tower in silence, and
then without words we had turned, seen to the filled magazines of the
pistols at our belts, and were passing out of the laboratory into the
bright sunlight. As silent as ever, we started southward.
Never, were my existence extended a thousand years, could there be
blotted from my memory that journey southward through the silent towers
of New York that Ferson and I made then. For the great city that lay
silent about us beneath the brilliant noon sunshine, was a city of
horror unutterable. Dead lay thick in its streets and great dogs,
already strange and fierce and wolf-like, ran in packs among them. The
rusting wrecks of smashed automobiles were piled at every corner. No
window of all we passed remained intact, sidewalks and streets were
sprinkled with shivered glass. Westward across the river a great fire
was burning in the cities there, pouring a black volume of flame-laced
smoke up to the skies. But more terrible than all of these things were
the hordes, the swarms of creatures that moved through the streets and
ways about us, the countless creatures that once had been the city's
people!
Great ape-like creatures they were, not apes such as men had known,
but ape-like races such as men had sprung from eons before. In groups
and packs of scores they roamed the city's ways. Covered with thick
hair, stooped and crouching of gait, the garments that they had worn
as men torn and discarded, there was in them no semblance to humanity.
They walked stiffly toward each other, stooping to rest hairy forearms
on the ground each few steps. They growled and barked in rage, or
chattered volubly and meaninglessly. The majority were prowling in
wrecked stores for fragments of food. Others moved along the streets in
a search for small animals, for insects even.
Growling in rage their groups came toward Ferson and me as we moved
onward, but each time a pistol-shot sent them fleeing from us. We moved
on, never speaking, Ferson's face icy calm, my own brain reeling. We
came at last to the base of the giant building that we knew must hold
whatever mechanism Grant was using to withhold the evolution vibrations
from the earth.
Ferson turned to speak to me for the first time. "Somewhere in here,"
he whispered. "We must search, Harker----to find Grant's apparatus----"
"And if he is with it?" I asked, but his only answer was to tighten his
grip on the pistol in his hand.
We passed into the great building's marble entrance hall, a place of
dim shadows, through which we stumbled over prostrate dead. We went
quickly through the looted, wrecked rooms that had been the luxurious
shops of its first level. Then the stairs, and we were going upward,
level after level, searching through the immense building's numberless
offices and rooms. In one or two were dead, and some had been wrecked,
but in none, in no part of the building, it seemed, were any of the
ape-like throngs. That seemed encouraging, somehow, and with beating
hearts we pressed on upward.
Level after level. We were high in the immense building; its floors
here were smaller of extent because of its pyramidal form. Yet there
was no sound from the shadows about us, no sign of what we sought.
Despair was growing in us, for we were high in the great tower that
was the building's uppermost part, and had found nothing. Through the
shadowy halls we pressed still, and through the silent rooms lit with
the gold of the westward-swinging sun. But as we moved up the narrow
stair toward the last and highest level of the great tower, something
flamed in Ferson's eyes as in mine.
A sound had come from above to our ears, a steady, slow clicking as of
a great clock. Pistols in hand, we moved up, found ourselves in a small
hall at the tower's side. The unused elevator-shaft was beside us, and
the stairs that led to the roof. But before us was the single door that
gave access, apparently, to the whole space of the tower's uppermost
level. And from behind it came the slow clicking to our ears!
As one we crossed the hall toward that door. Ferson's hand on its knob
turned slowly, and slowly, astoundingly, the door swung open. Our
pistols lowered for the moment in our amazement, we stepped through,
stopped. A dozen feet before us stood Grant, a heavy automatic in his
hand trained upon us.
Silence. In it Grant's eyes held ours. His dark-browed powerful face
was lit with unholy triumph, with sardonic exultation. I saw that
before us was the whole space of the tower's highest level, thrown into
one great room. Huge black-cased and powerful batteries were ranged
upon each other in scores at one side of the room. Armored cables led
from them through incalculable generators and transformers to a great
object at the big room's center. It was like a giant searchlight, a
dozen feet or more in diameter, swung in a frame resembling gimbals, so
that it could be turned in any direction. The twelve-foot disk inside
it glowed silently with white light, and the great thing was turned
to face exactly the sinking sun westward. It was slowly following
the descending sun, turning slowly under the action of a great
clock-mechanism, whose clicking was loud in our ears still.
Grant, Ferson and I----we were silent there in the room, all
motionless, until Grant spoke. His voice was metallic, controlled,
mocking.
"Ferson and Harker," he was saying. "Ferson and Harker, who believed in
my theory, my power, it seems, when none else on earth did. Who made
projectors like the one that I wear, and have escaped the world doom
that I have released. Have escaped and have come in search of me, with
pistols in their hands, even!"
My brain was racing. I knew that to lift the arms in our grasp meant
instant death. Grant's sardonic mirth lashed suddenly out in scorn.
"To come through the city toward this building firing shots!" he
mocked. "Shots that made those brute-swarms beneath us flee, but that
warned me at the same time of your coming! To steal clumsily in upon
me that way, thinking to surprise me and halt the work that's not yet
finished!"
"That work has gone on too long, Grant," said Ferson slowly, his voice
strange. "It cannot go on longer."
"Cannot?" came the bitter voice. "You mistake, Ferson--it must and
shall. What are they now but brutes, animals; the world of men that
derided and refused my work, that might have transformed them into
gods? Brutes, and even more brutal shall they become, going down
through form after form to the first protoplasm. They asked for
proof----I have given the world proof, have thrown back humanity eons
on the road of progress! And I will throw them and all earth's life
back farther still! This great projector----it is worth the months it
took to build it--months that I toiled here and posed as a scientist
studying electrical phenomena, working to finish the projector at
last and turn its great damping vibration toward the sun in a mighty
ray! A vibration tuned to neutralize and destroy that part of the
sun's evolution vibrations radiating toward earth! You have lost,
Ferson----Harker, for you both die this moment and this projector shall
continue to withhold the evolution vibrations from earth until its life
has been thrown back in this world atavism into the primal protoplasm!
Until I alone am left living upon----"
His pistol roared, for it was at that instant that Ferson leaped. But
even the bullet could not halt Ferson's rush, so swift and unexpected
was it, and he struck Grant, knocked him back, I leaped toward the
projector.
Grant's pistol was detonating even as he was knocked back, though,
and half-way to the machine something seemed to strike me two swift,
smashing blows beneath the shoulder. I swayed, staggered on to the
projector, was beneath it and reaching toward the cables leading into
it. Grant was springing toward me, his pistol at my head. But behind
him Ferson, blood on his lips and on his breast, half-raised himself,
the pistol in his hand speaking. At its crack Grant swayed, collapsed
and fell, the black compact case at his belt, that had preserved him,
breaking loose as he struck the floor.
Ferson, leaning, had his dimming eyes upon me, striving to speak.
I reached, grasped the cables, tore at them once, twice, and then
they had ripped loose. The white light of the disk inside the great
projector vanished, and the mechanism that moved it ceased its
clicking. The world atavism, that had thrown the races of man back to
the state that had been theirs eons before, was ended at last! Ferson,
his eyes on mine, seemed to smile feebly in approval. Then his body
slipped quietly down and he lay as motionless and silent as Grant.
Afterword
I have been writing here in this silent room for a time, whose length
I cannot guess. Westward, though, the sun is touching the horizon, its
level rays searching through this room, over the great projector and
over Ferson and Grant, lying silent before me.
My life is ebbing swiftly from me with each passing minute, yet with
the age-old instinct of man strong in me I have striven thus to leave a
record of the great change, that men of the future in some far day may
read.
Men of the future! For there will be such, there must be such. The
upward surge of evolutionary progress that has been interrupted, set
back, here on earth begins again its slow upward climb with the halting
of this projector, the coming again of the evolution vibrations that
are now playing on earth again. Beneath me, in the silent city, there
swarm the ape-like hordes that were once humanity, but through the
coming ages they will climb up again through troglodyte and savage
barbarian to man!
And it is for those men of the far future that I have written with
my last strength these words, as a record and a warning that I shall
enclose in the steel box beside me.
A warning that their civilization be never cast back from man to
brute as ours has been. And if God send that they heed that warning,
none among them ever shall die as I die now, the last man of all men,
looking down through the sunset into the familiar but infinitely
strange city, where roam the hordes that once were men. Sunset! Sunset
for our civilization, our races, as for the earth. But, dying, I know
that after their passing there must come with the slow upward climb of
evolution new races, new civilizations, as surely as after sunset and
night must come the----
The End
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