more than precarious hope of avoiding the common death. Yet the fact was that she had been waked to a more vivid mood than she had known in the years behind. Life roused itself at the nearness of death, as, in those who deserve its boon, it will ever do. If she had more fear than her life had known till that hour, she had also more active hope. Fear and hope fed from the same dish, on which they equally thrived. She had more fear than when she had voted for her own end, for resignation was gone.
There came a time when her evening meal slid on to the table, as it would ever do at the same hour, by which she knew that the time for which she waited had come.
She must not stay to eat, though the routines of life had become so absolute that she had a puzzled wonder as to what the consequences of such abstention might prove to be. She rose at once from the pneumatic couch on which she had reclined in the relaxation of thought, and made a way to the apartment of Colpeck-4XP which no bolts obstructed, and which was independent of opening doors.
The solidity of matter, which had been an accepted faith of the nineteenth century, had become, in the twentieth, more or less theoretically denied or experimentally refuted, without being recognized for the utter delusion which it was subsequently demonstrated to be.
It was recognized as a mathematical possibility that, as an atom consists of molecules as far apart from one another, and relatively as small, as the planets of the solar system, if each of these molecules should be themselves of no greater density, nor composed of more solid particles, then, if the universe were compressed to an absolute solidity, it might—even on the assumption that the material has objective reality—be compressed into less space than is now occupied by a pin’s head: but this knowledge was incomplete and unapplied.
Vinetta (avoiding the sliding rails by which the food-machines and other services did their silent, punctual work) walked through walls that were opaque to sight, and contained sound, but were no hindrance to her, or to the purple garment she wore. The privacies of the world which Vinetta knew were not secured by bolt or lock, but by an iron rule of routine, which had become stronger than any law.
Now she made a circuitous way through rooms which would be vacant at such an hour, and walked at last, with a quiet face, but a fast-beating heart, into the one she sought.
“Do you mind,” she asked, “if I talk to you now? It is important—to me,” Colpeck-4XP had been sucking mixed fruit-juices through a tube, in small quantities, at the regulation intervals. A plate of some pink substance which, apart from its colour, had the appearance of grated cheese, stood before him to be eaten later. He looked up astonished, perhaps repelled, by this invasion, unprecedented not merely in his individual experiences but in the records of eccentricity or crime during several previous centuries.
“I shouldn’t have come without cause,” she said uncertainly, controlling with difficulty the desire to withdraw from the sight of another human being absorbing drink.
“No,” he agreed dubiously. “I suppose not.” He had ceased to drink. He laid down the glass tubes. Her sense of having outraged both his modesty and her own diminished somewhat with this cessation, though, as his eyes met hers, she could not control a blush such as may not have been observed for three hundred years on a woman’s face.
“I haven’t come to Colpeck-4XP,” she went on, bravely ignoring her burning cheeks, “but to Wyndham Smith.”
That was what she had resolved to and it seemed to have some effect.
“Yes,” he said, though still in that dubious puzzled voice. “There is that. But why have you come?”
“I went to see Colpeck-4XP,” she answered, “an hour ago.”
“You—yes, I see. But why?”
“He will be willing to remain in his present body, if you concur.”
The information was of a nature to cause Wyndham Smith, now that the first shock of traditional unseemliness was over, to forget the circumstances in which they met.
He had been thinking rather sombrely, during the last hour, of the alternatives that lay before him—either to return to a barbarous, bloody world of which he had no recollection now, and of which he could only form a vaguely terrible picture, or to face the utter loneliness of a deserted earth, with no better prospect than solitary death at last, which would end his species with himself—one of these—or else to join the general euthanasia which was the deliberately selected doom of his fellow men.
But the actual choice he had supposed to be even less than that. The accepted rule was that a transferred identity must be adjusted within two days unless both the egos concerned should prefer to continue in their exchanged tenements, and such an occurrence had never been. Was it likely now?
The information she brought gave him a choice which he might not have had, and which might not be easy to make. It was welcome news. But it explained nothing. Before he discussed, he must understand. “Why,” he asked, “did you get him to tell you that?”
“Because it was essential for me to know whether, if I should agree on something with you tonight, I should have to deal with someone else tomorrow.”
Yes. He saw that. That was sense. But what bargain could she wish to make? “To what,” he asked, “do you want me to agree?”
“Before I say that, will you tell me whether you mean to go back to the other life?”
“It sounds the most natural thing to do.”
“History tells us that it was very horrible. Pain. Heat. Cold. Quarrels. Bad food. Diseases. All sorts of muddle and dirt. Even insects under your clothes.”
“We haven’t decided that this life is any good.”
“But that must have been worse in ever so many ways.”
“And yet people wished to live.”
“But you are going to live. You’ve arranged that.”
“Not in a very attractive manner.”
“Then it is just to oblige Colpeck-4XP to come back to that, if he thinks even the twentieth century wouldn’t be so bad? It’s you who’ve done that for him, and then you won’t face it yourself.”
“That’s foolish. He can end his life here, if he will. He’ll be no worse off than he was before. In fact, better. I’ve given him a chance that he wouldn’t have had the initiative to get for himself.”
This was a disconcerting reply. She had hoped something from this argument of justice, knowing that the brain which Wyndham Smith now controlled was of a particular scrupulosity on points for honour. But his reply was difficult to rebut. She had a better hope when he added, “But I haven’t said yet that I won’t let him have his way.”
She said, “There won’t be much pleasure in being the only creature alive, even though the machines go on working, as I suppose they will, more or less”
“I doubt that. No. I don’t see that there will.”
Their eyes met. Prompted by the insurgent ego of twentieth-century barbarism which now controlled it, the brain of Colpeck-4XP became alive to the implication of this amazing interview.
“Suppose,” she said, refusing to withdraw the gaze which he met so disconcertingly, “that you
