learn from it for the first time what his answer would be. “I dissent.”
The stir of interest, of expectation, was more pronounced. His memory told him that the assembly had not been equally moved—slight as its emotion might now be—by any previous event that it had considered within his time. But the chairman showed no emotion, no surprise, at this reply which might deny the will of almost the whole of the human race. He asked quietly, “Do you dissent from a settled mind, or do you desire that the question be more discussed?”
“I would have it further discussed.”
“Then it is so it shall be.”
The chairman went on with the formal questions, taking the replies of the remaining two, and when it had been heard that they also agreed, so that Wyndham Smith was the sole dissenting voice in the world of men, he turned his attention to him again, with a question which was the routine of such a position.
“By what argument do you dissent?”
Wyndham did not find it easy to answer that. He might have said that he felt an instinctive antipathy to self-destruction, that his was a fighting ego which was not willing to own defeat; but he knew that his feelings had not been asked. It was reason he was invited to give.
There was a pause of silence before he said, “It is that which should be done completely, if it be attempted at all. From most evil conditions man has struggled free at the last, and has found—as you are agreed—that there is nothing better beyond, that he has come by a hard road to a house where no treasure lies. If we are so certain of that, should we not end all life, and not only ourselves? Should we not sterilize the land and sea so that life, which, there is sound reason to think, is a peculiarity of this planet alone, will come to its final end? For else, may not life assert itself in a new form which will be akin to that which we have destroyed, and our protest be a Creator’s jest?”
It was not what he intended to urge. It was merely the first criticism which could be supplied by a brain which did not respond to the feeling which called upon it. In the long minutes of silence that followed—which were no more than the customary courtesy which all speakers received at that assembly, where haste was a forgotten word, and it would have been thought unmannerly to answer without a pause of consideration—he had a better thought, which he also spoke:
“Also, if it be allowed that we have come by a bad road to no better end, there is yet a choice which we might prefer to take rather than that which is so nearly agreed. We can go back by the way we came, to find, perhaps, a somewhat different advance to a fairer goal.”
His words fell into the same silence, which they prolonged. He was not surprised at that, his brain being familiar with the ways of his fellow-men. He became aware that this silence was shared by five millions beyond those walls, who had supposed few moments before, that their own voices had sealed their doom.
Pilwin-C6P was the first to speak. He said, “It could be done. It might be the better way. Nor need it long defer that on which we are already resolved.”
He thought only of the first proposal that Wyndham made. Being the one who had originated the idea of the cessation of human life, he would have been likely to support the resolution with more than average decision, but Wyndham’s argument recalled the proposal his ancestor had made for the sterilization of the oceans, which had been rejected at that time for reasons which would have lost their force if it should be preceded by the extinction of human life. He saw his ancestor justified at the last; and though any feeling of pride or satisfaction in the prestige or achievements of his clan, or of an individual ancestor, would have been esteemed a barbaric indecency, such as he would not have admitted, even to himself, that he could be degraded to feel, yet the atavistic instinct stirred faintly beneath his mind, rendering him more tolerant of Wyndham’s argument than he would otherwise have become.
It was a point on which he spoke with authority, and the chairman, after a pause of a few minutes to give opportunity for any further comment, and seeing that all were silent in acceptance of the statement that Pilwin-C6P had made, gave his ruling thereon.
“The first amendment,” he said, “which has been proposed, is no more than a point of detail, such as may be resolved here without the delay which a general reference would require. On the assurance which we have received that the elimination of life in non-human forms could be completed without complicating the major proposition, I am prepared to rule that we may authorize that such steps be taken immediately that the resolution itself be accepted with the unanimity which it requires.”
He addressed Wyndham directly as he concluded, “If you can accept the resolution on that condition being agreed, your second argument will not arise.”
But Wyndham had also had time for thought. He was clear now as to his own will, and his arguments were gaining order and strength in a mind that must respond to a new control. “But,” he replied, “it is the second which I prefer.”
The chairman regarded him with a gravity which approached rebuke. If the removal of the first objection would leave him unsatisfied, what point had there been in considering it at all? But he saw that, by a fine distinction of logic, this objection might be repulsed. For Wyndham had allowed that he was open to argument on the main proposal, and it might be that, if he should be persuaded that his second proposition was of an impossible quality, he might then accept the resolution with the newly accepted condition attached thereto, which he would otherwise have declined.
He asked, “You propose that men should go back to the barbarism from which they came?”
“I propose that men might revert to conditions of less settled security.”
Had Wyndham Smith been, in his previous body, in control of the brain it held, he would doubtless have surprised the assembly by following this statement with a speech in its support, which might have lengthened into thousands of randomly chosen words; but he knew that the custom here was of a more orderly kind.
The debate which went on for the next two hours was a matter of grave and silent consideration, frequently punctuated by brief, pregnant, carefully worded remarks, many of which were of such a nature as to give no indication of the side to which the speaker’s mind was disposed to lean. The members of the assembly appeared to be too absolute in self-control, or too deficient in emotional vitality, to be stirred to any mental excitement, or emphasis of expression, by the momentous nature of the question with which they dealt. Only the ego of Wyndham Smith, accustomed to the urgencies of more strenuous days, was restrained with effort to the same outward placidity by the traditions of the brain of which he had so recently gained control.
But from the pregnant silence, these occasional observations, an opinion gradually emerged that there would be a probably insuperable difficulty in obtaining any general measure of agreement as to the extent or nature of the retrogression to be undertaken; an almost invincible reluctance to face once more the pains and dangers from which mankind had escaped by so bitter and long a way. The unanimity which had accepted its own defeat, which had agreed upon the fulfilment, if not the frustration, of human destiny, could not be anticipated even for the abstract principle of an alternative which must be repulsive to the finer instincts of every sensitive and civilized mind; and still less would there be any probability of agreement upon the details of retreat to the savageries of competition, the horrors of death and pain.
It was Pilwin-C6P, seeing the imminent prospect that the plan for which he felt parent’s affection would go down before the opposition of a single man (and he, as they all knew, being no more than the ego a distant, barbarous age), who proposed the solution which would be sufficient save it.
“Why,” he asked, “should it not be resolved
