A Thousand Years Hence/Chapter 21
Brown's remarkable dream.—Author, chap. i.
"Old Shaver," said I to myself, as Brown and I descended his door-steps, "you are wrong there at any rate—decidedly wrong, even with all your high ter-cross attainments. We inferior mortals of earth long regarded the ter-cross as exclusively Divine Power; and now that this power has been humanly reached by you Upper Solars, it is the quarto-cross that has become Divine, and so on! But neither the quarto nor the quinto, no, nor yet the dekka, nor even the cento-cross, may prove beyond human attainment. Our duty and privilege are to keep marching unceasingly onward, ever labouring to add to our knowledge; even if ever to find ahead a constantly enlarging field for our further journey."
Wholly absorbed by high thoughts of this kind, I had gone on a considerable distance without once thinking of Brown. But at last the regular patter of feet broke upon my heretofore absorbed ears, and, turning round, I saw the old fellow following, just like, of all things, as I thought at the moment, some awed spaniel at his master's heels. I am sorry to have to confess to some feeling of contempt for my old friend, just for the moment, creeping over me; and this again was promptly followed by a serious business consideration, to the effect that Brown, while contributing but little, possibly nothing at all, worth inserting in our forthcoming work, and leaving me to supply all the brains, was yet to appropriate the full half of the profits. This latter consideration, in fact, took quite a sudden hold upon me at that moment; and no wonder, for the prospects of our volume were then of the most promising kind. So I resolved, there and then, upon a cautiously tentative approach to the subject.
"Well, Brown," said I, with an assumed perfect indifference, "all these wonders we have passed through are grand padding to our volume. Profit looms ahead if they are properly described."
"Oh, bother your profit, Green!" said Brown energetically, with all the disgusted air of a mind unwillingly interrupted in other and higher thoughts.
"Hoity, toity!" said I to myself: "what's all up now! And is even old Brown amongst the prophets—lost perhaps in that grand mist of the universe we have just been exploring! "I was most immensely amused. But presently the matter took with me, somewhat irresistibly, a business shape. "Well, Brown," I said, "if you don't mind those despised considerations, I am agreeable, by myself alone, to take all the trouble, as well as stand solely good for all the undoubted publication risks and costs, on condition, of course
"Bother the whole subject!" repeated Brown, interrupting me. But, alas! the original energy thrown into the sentence had entirely vanished. The words were there, but the spirit was gone. So I ported my helm, to avoid the visible breakers, and wait and woo some more promising opportunity.
We duly reached, on our return, the Upper Solardom border, repassed the gateway, this time without the slightest interference or even notice, and after a stroll through the far more active, varied, and genial scenes of the "Lower Life" outside, we re-embarked, to rejoin White and his company on their return home via Mercury. While we retraced aloft the vast solar landscape, I was this time busy over my notes of all that had occurred, so as to secure my description whilst all was still fresh on the mind. I was thus occupied till within some six hours of our destination, when, throughly wearied out in spite of all the excitement, I lay down to rest and was promptly fast asleep. Then followed—
I dreamt that another thousand years had swept over our earth, bringing us from the present A.D. 2882 to the year of grace 3882, with all its wonders of still additional and ever-increasing population and advanced and still ever-advancing science. We had then honeycombed our earth far towards the centre in order to make room for the multitudes of human beings: while outwards, again, we had occupied all the atmosphere, and were anchored out, in large space-colonizing detachments, even considerably beyond its limits. Travelling had long been driven off into the pure surrounding ether, and there truly the rate of speed and the roominess of space were as yet all that could be desired.
Brown and I still took regularly our half-holiday Saturday trip; but it was now a considerable way, even beyond the atmosphere, into outside space. I comforted Brown with the calculation that even the comparatively small space between us and Sirius could pack within one narrow belt the whole of our world's population, and even the additions for some centuries more ahead into the bargain. Although the world's population seemed then in a thorough jam as compared with now, yet none seemed to feel inconvenienced. No one wished to retreat to the smaller days of the past; but at the same time every one wondered, just as we ourselves now do in the twenty-ninth century, how people could possibly get on, with our then pace of progress, after a still further thousand years.
The great feature of the time was that we had attained to the ter-cross. The phosphate supply question was all past and done with, because we could now interconvert all the varieties of material substance, reducing them all, by command of adequate intensity of heat, to the one simple element of matter, and reconstituting the due proportions of chemical diversity as required exactly for our life and food and all other wants. The danger of the future, although still at a reasonably safe distance, was not a scarcity of phosphates or of any other substance in particular, but of substance itself in general; for what were we to do when by the increase of human bodies all the earth's substance had been absorbed? Were we to prey upon the other orbs of space, and thus increase our earth into unknown future dimensions? Some pretended already, even in the reality of this twenty-ninth century, to decipher that prospect upon the future horizon. Already, it might be said, we were, at times and in places, hard run to maintain the full needed supplies, the carbon and oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen, and the other lesser needs, being kept unremittingly at work in their successive coursing through our material frames. In this growing relative scarcity, one body must perhaps imbibe at once what another throws off. The laboratory intervenes to convert exhaled poison into indispensable nutriment. The ubiquitous reign of chemistry is already triumphant.
Returning to the dream, one vast field of business seemed opening out, in providing from time to time the extensions to our atmosphere, as required, on the one hand, by extension of subterranean excavation, and, on the other, by the overcrowding aerial population. When the volume of our wants in oxygen and nitrogen had become too great for the slow and costly process of decomposing the earth's solid masses, we had recourse to outside supplies, and had already made considerable havoc of Jupiter's gaseous envelope, where both the gases in question were to be had unlimitedly for the taking, only that the expense of disengaging and deporting was very considerable. But latterly the grand source of the most suitable and most economical supply had been the comets. No oxygen comets had been met with, but in our system there were not a few of the smaller of these members of the family composed, wholly or mainly, of nitrogen; and one of them had, not long before, been wholly captured, and piloted, by cross-electric conduction, safely into our earth, where it was duly intermixed with an oxygen stream similarly and simultaneously conducted from Jupiter. The State authorities had made large contracts in this way, and many contractors had made large fortunes. Both Brown and I had contrived to secure a share.
But the progress which surpassed all else, and which ever commanded the deepest interest of that time, was that of outside travel, which had now passed far beyond the puny distances of the realities of our own time, and within our own system. My old friend White turned up here also once more, and this time making voyages, not merely to our next-door neighbours the planets, but to the stars. The nearer systems in fact were reached within the few days or weeks that are now occupied in our interplanetary travel. A very grand scheme was in contemplation, under White's redoubtable leadership—no less than a public excursion to the nebula in Argo, in order to survey, from some near but sufficiently safe position, the marvellously stupendous movements that are of late developing there, in the gradual process of evolving a huge solar system. This system, in its foreshortened position, as regarded our point of view, had long seemed to be carrying on many incomprehensible antics. But, latterly, we had clearly demonstrated the whole case; and the result was a very general inclination to know more of the subject by a closer view of those protracted pangs of celestial parturition into which the nebulous matrix had fallen. Those who were willing for the vast journey would bring back the description to those who were not, or who could not afford the time or the money.
There was quite a mania for this trip, and considerable numbers from Venus, and a sprinkling even from Mercury and Vulcan were tempted to join. They mostly preferred coming to us of the earth, so as to be under old White's approved leadership. There were still, even after this further thousand years, as I dreamt, many Lower Solars lingering along the Solar Equator, and not a few of these, as they confessed, might have joined us also, but for the inconvenience they felt, and the heavy counter-energy cost they were continuously put to, on quitting the accustomed enormous gravity of the sun's surface. Their squat room-taking figures, too, rendered them somewhat ungenial fellow-travellers. But again, our company, upon the celestial ground of destination, was not to be limited, by any means, to our own small solar system; for many systems around us were fired by the same ambitious object, and simultaneous expeditions from each system had been agreed to. We could sufficiently trust our latest universe charts, so as to meet one another at appointed stations in space, and it was quite expected that spectators and their vehicles, in form of a vast amphitheatre, would more or less surround the agitated expanse of the nebula.
And lastly, as to the question of speed. White, with his usual and well-practised daring, would hardly condescend to put limits to his powers, short of electric-light message speed itself. Give him the open sea, he would always say, far clear of all intervening island systems, and he could work up speed indefinitely. He spoke of attaining a twentieth, a tenth, nay, a fifth even, of the message speed: which was somewhat like saying, that the speed of light itself, 186,000 miles in a second, was to be eclipsed as much as that speed, when first made known, eclipsed all other speeds of our then knowledge. White reckoned that six weeks would bestride the vast interval in question, with further allowance for the "slack" at either extremity of the voyage—a rather troublesome case it was, in dealing with our corporate and living bodies, seeing that the said slack involved about as much of precious time as the main voyage itself.
White had made enormous preparations, alike for speed and safety. The outlay upon anti-vis-inertial energy, and anti-momentum energy, was something fabulous; and no wonder that the passage-money ran up even to thousands of energy per head. Another stupendous cost was the vast panoply of cross-electric lines thrown out, forming, in fact, an encompassing cylinder, ever far ahead along the route to the nebula. Even the continuous pay-out of this costly process for the earth's axial motion was an appreciable addition. But in fact every such precaution was taken for safety, regardless of expense, so that the minutest meteoric body, entering within the lines even a billion miles ahead, was almost at once indicated at the pilotage, and by the admirable self-action of that advanced day avoided.
Brown and I, of course, had made up our minds to go on this trip. Indeed, we had other and better objects than mere curiosity, scientific or general. We had our eye upon capturing a good slice of the nebula itself, and were to take the necessary cross-electric apparatus for the purpose, having already, by anticipation, for the safety of all the travelling world, chalked out the path of the mass, after we had detached it and sent it speeding homewards, and having intimated publicly the time of start and rate of travel, according to all customary precaution. In fact, a powerful syndicate had been formed regarding this nebula-prizing. Brown and I were appointed the managing agents, and our mere joint brokerage, even at a thirty-second, further reduced, by return commission, to a sixty-fourth, was not to be despised.
Well, we were both duly at White's office to secure and pay for our passages. I saw Brown's hand deep into his breeches pocket for the needed energy notes, and at the same time I marked a pang flitting over his face at having to part with so much hard-earned money. White, who stood by, getting impatient at this hesitation and delay, with all the waiting crowd of passengers behind, roared out to us to make haste; and thereupon, sad to say, I awoke, and all our greatness and progress was but a dream!