The Great Fog (11 page)

“‘Of course, I am completely ignorant of the charges that compose your species. But just making a guess, because we are both warm-blooded creatures, I should surmise that your vitality is now fairly good. Moreover, I am pretty sure, from the way some of those fringes'—and I saw the shadow of his big finger indicating where certain bright lines seemed thrusting their way into less bright zones on the lit panel—‘are growing, that any vitality you may have lost is now being rapidly restored. It is here that we check up on the health of our community, and by this method we can often tell when there is too much expenditure of energy, and then we can warn the patient to balance his life better.' He threw open the door and led me back into the ward.

“‘The problem here,' he said, ‘is the most complex problem of all. I doubt if we shall really solve it until we are quite certain what the meaning of life is. These patients here—of course, they cannot understand a word we are saying to each other—are, as you noticed, all elderly; some of them are eighty. Further, they are all suffering from—or perhaps I should say, they are all burdened with—tumors. All our diagnostic work has not yet settled that problem: what are these tumors? Are they life or death? Is this a question life is asking of us because it has superior knowledge and wishes us to understand the mystery, the secret of which it knows, or is life itself held up by the problem of general control and asking us to solve for it?'

“As we talked, we strolled from that building to another, some distance away. The one we had left was hushed. The one we approached was a contrast. Before we entered, I realized it wasn't for patients. As we passed through the door the din of healthiness doubled, and we saw that it rose from a bathing pool full of seal creatures and young penguins. They were plunging and diving, rushing around in wonderful underwater, racing, circling and somersaulting until the water seathed and bubbled as though it had been aerated. Every now and then a newcomer rushed out from what I took to be dressing cubicles—though it did seem a little unnecessary for creatures who couldn't be naked and ashamed and for whom the water was as much home as the land—and, just as frequently, someone from the pool slipped from view through one of these small doors.

“We strolled along—the noise was too great for conversation though it was the happiest din I've heard—and, leaving the court, we entered into a second area through a door at the end. This, however, was paved, though the paving was so smooth and polished you might have taken it for a sheet of water. The place was quite as full as the other, but didn't immediately give the same impression of being crowded. That was because everyone was moving with beautiful precision in a single, wonderfully elaborate pattern. The whole company, though it filled the place, was dancing with such ease that the units, flowing in and out of each other, suggested the integration of a great loom in full play.

“When I was in Europe I was once rather keen on the ballet—perhaps you've cared for it? It was a rage once upon a time—well, you should see the kind of choreography that super-seals and penguins can extemporize. The one sort of creature had a sinuousness that, as I've said, I'd never seen before or since in any living body—the other moved with a precision of swing, with a pivotal balance which gave just the right solidity and accent and emphasis to the almost liquid movement of the partners in the pattern. I recovered, however, from my interested surprise and remembered why we were there.

“‘A laboratory?' I questioned. ‘We were going to see a laboratory, I thought.' He nodded affirmatively and strode on to a third court. Here the population seemed to be older and were not moving about. They were ranged in rows and, here again, the greater part of them were the penguin, or the seal type, though there were occasional examples of other species. But it was the sound, not the sight, that arrested one. They were producing the strangest music I've ever heard. They were—I suppose you'd have to call it—singing. One could pick out a deep whistling, a curious ululation and even odder fluting sounds. The only human music I can at all liken it to is that wonderful thing which Brahms composed toward the end of his life. Do you remember it? It was written, I believe, for the greatest clarinet player of the day.

“Well, when those penguin creatures put up their beaks and let the air flute and bubble from their raised necks, you would hear the strange, desolate, but exultant music which in that clarinet piece always seems to me like the cry, half of triumph half of anguish, that some bird creature, aware of the whole longing of life, might utter. And beside them broke out that baying chorus of the seal creatures. I listened, half-stunned, half-fascinated, till I heard my own tongue quacking in my ear. Yes, this was the laboratory. I looked around, my face expressing what my voice couldn't express in that tide of sound—complete bewilderment. He waved me out, and we went through a door in the farther wall, out to where the quiet countryside waited for us and the sound dwindled.

“As we strolled along he remarked, ‘You are surprised at that being a place of research—of course, you only saw half of it.' I thought he was going to say something about my not being a trained observer, but he reassured my vanity by adding, ‘I didn't take you into the other side for fear of disturbing the workers themselves.' ‘Where were they?' I asked.

“‘In behind those little doors through which you saw the testees passing in and out. You see, first of all, as we know that the organism is a single unit, our work is done not merely on parts of the living creature, but on it as a whole. Furthermore, while we do find out a certain amount when we nurse and heal the old and the injured, naturally, we find out much more if we work on the fit and the young. We study the arch of life from two sides, where it rises and where it declines.'

“‘But,' I asked, ‘do you have to keep them so noisily amused while they are waiting for their physical examination?' His third eyelid shot across his eye. ‘No,' he answered, and one could almost hear the smile in his voice. ‘No, you did really see part of the experiment, not merely the waiting place. We want to study life, he said, not merely when it is up against check, conflict, and defeat. If we are really to know it, we must know it at its highest. So, you see, we have the youngest and freshest in the first two courts and, in the third, those at the peak of their strength.'

“‘But what were they doing, weren't they amusing themselves?' I asked.

“‘Yes, and just as any creature that is really healthy, they were creating, too.'

“‘I don't understand.'

“‘Well, we know that life, even when it is most healthy, is not really at the top of its form unless it is expressing itself, is letting the rhythm in it, the rhythm of which it is made, find utterance in the world round it. Those people you saw were, as it were, tuning themselves up. Then, when each has reached his full tonicity, he runs in. At the other side of those doors are panels, like the one you stood in front of, and there observers are making readings all the time, studying the field of each body, seeing its height of potential. Before starting their exercises they are checked; and against the datum line of their unaroused vitality, the pitch that they can reach when they are in full form is scored. So we get some idea, in terms of a calibration of radiation which I fear I cannot explain in detail to you, of the height of vitality to which we should aspire, of the pitch of consciousness at which we might live. So we hope, in the end, to be able to plot the curve of life and discover the level of intensity of consciousness at which we ought to live if we are to fulfill the life within us during the term in which it manifests itself.'

“I own I was a little puzzled by all this and couldn't quite make out what he was driving at. Was this, I wondered, some queer bid for rejuvenation and perpetual youth? Perhaps he saw there wasn't much use telling me more at that point, for he strolled on in silence for a little while. The path leading toward home, after we had gone a few hundred yards, crossed a level surface covered with small billows of turf. To break the silence I asked, ‘What are those?' thinking they might be some odd, natural formation. ‘That—' he remarked over his shoulder, ‘that's the cemetery.'

“‘Then you do have death?'

“‘Why not? It isn't death that puzzles us. It is the failure of death to be a natural process. Birth and death balance each other. But as there can be a healthy birth, so there should be a healthy death. And as there can be a very clumsy and dangerous birth, so there can be a clumsy and dangerous death. That is our problem. I think we know the term of life as we know the term of birth. Birds are, perhaps by their nature, more familiar with the mystery of hatching than are mammals. I don't think we should fall easily into the illusion that life, in any one of its forms or its aspects, is complete in that aspect. No, when our people or any of our living wards become old, what we want for them is a clean and healthy delivery into another experience. So, you see, what we are doing in the ward you've just left, the last ward, is not to make these creatures immortal or even to recover but to see how far we can smooth out the knot of life so that they may be easily born and well-born into their next experience.'

“I confess that I never thought about life in quite so comprehensive a manner as that. After a moment's pause I said, “I thought that you were attempting to make a world here in which everything would be stabilized. I suppose mechanical notions are so firmly fixed in my head that I can't believe you would really trust life as far as death. I thought somehow it would all end happily ever afterward, in a perpetually revolving machine.'

“‘Yes,' he said, and I think he nearly chuckled; I know he put out his hand and touched my shoulder. ‘Yes, we don't dictate to life; as its acolytes, we only ask whether we may be permitted to be of assistance. The machine can only repeat, and if we repeated we should be machines and untrue to the stanchless creative mystery of the life within us. All we may hope to do is to bring into consciousness, without thwarting that power, some of its mysterious potentiality.'

“‘Then,' I said tentatively and with a little sense of nervous humor, ‘you don't have incubators?'

“‘No,' and now I was sure he chuckled, ‘no, we still think that life, when it takes a hand, should be allowed to have its head, and that, if I may go a step further in anatomy, means trusting the heart. You see, we know enough to know how little we know. I can tell you this: there is something superbly mysterious in parenthood. I am not talking from vague speculation. We did experiment, and we found out, as we are always finding out where nature lets us help, and where she has already told us what kind of help she wishes us to give. Something goes on between the parents and the chick even when it is in the egg. Probably it is a radiation which we have not yet “cracked.” And like most natural balances it is a real balance. Life, when it is not thwarted, is a very just balancer. What is good for the chick is also good for the parents. They gain something from this fostering period as does their child.'

“This line of thought again gave me almost too much to turn over in my mind. I broke the silence by saying, ‘We had a philosopher who started us on our present scientific career, and he said, ‘Obey nature in order to rule her.'

“‘Yes,' he remarked meditatively. ‘Yes, I think that may account for certain things I had gathered about the human race. Certainly our motto would be: “Control nature in order to obey her.” Well,' he said after a pause, ‘that, you see, is our secret in a nutshell. We have the direct power, as you would say, over life, but, as I would say, to work in with life, to work in the very web of being. Elsewhere intelligent beings can only have an indirect power. And, having this, we don't need anything else. As I have told you, we don't know the end of the story. Perhaps we never shall. But we do know that we are on the way, that we have as much truth as we can grasp, and that it is yielding us the fullness of life.'

“He was silent for a little while, and then he went on in a lighter tone. ‘Of course, though our lives look idyllic and simple, you see that, just behind the appearance, is power, the vastest power life has ever known, which till now no form of life has ever been permitted to handle. We expose ourselves to a tornado of pelting force, a force which can take matter to pieces and make flesh rot into a pulp. But, like a carver of hard stone, we may manipulate what we hold in our hands in the cutting stream of this force and, by skilled manipulation make the stream of destruction carve new living forms for us in living tissue, without shedding a drop of blood. We build up what we need or, rather, what we believe life needs from us. We take evolution's slow ideal and, going into the furnace of power, we cast for it what it would have taken millions of years for it to forge on the anvil of events. And when the life process has become thwarted in some blind alley, we draw it back, we remelt it and resupple it and give back the creative power of freedom to those who had all but lost it.'

“He stopped, and, even in his quiet steady quack I thought I caught a slight tremor of emotion, of daring, of sighted triumph. So this was what this odd place was for. This was what these strange creatures, or at least this master creature, lived for. ‘One question,' I said, ‘How—'

“‘Yes,' he remarked, ‘you ought to have that question answered before I put my final one to you. You were going to ask, weren't you, how it is that I know as much as I do?'

“‘Well,' I replied, a little embarrassed, ‘of course I am a bit taken aback—'

“‘And of course,' he replied quickly, ‘I can't really explain to you how I know, unless you have the kind of mind I have. Mind you,' he went on almost a little hurriedly, ‘mind you, I don't want to suggest that your mind has not channels of apprehension far better than mine. But I think it must be clear to you that though we are both warm-blooded animals and so have converged on intelligence, we come to understanding from different sides and so with different insights. I can explain this a little by pointing out that we birds have two gifts that you mammals lack; one is the emotions, and the other is the senses. To be brief, in our development they have chimed. By nature we have a profound sensitiveness, although we ourselves may seem massive and even stolid to you. You must remember that our whole metabolism is faster and our vital heat greater. Our lives are as lengthy as yours, but we live more intensely than you do in the allotted seventy years. Of course, high emotional intuition not governed by intelligence will not lead to understanding, but it is an invaluable spur to the sympathy that is the understanding of the heart. The other thing that adds so greatly to our knowledge is this strange sensory gift. As you know, in all the pigeon family it is present as a sensitiveness to the earth's magnetic field. Their homing instinct is possible by their ability to attend to this frame of reference and so know their bearings. And all the migratory species also carry their own power to apprehend invisible tracks. Now, put those two things together.'