"The Coming of the Ice"
© 1926
by
G. Peyton Wertenbaker
It is strange to be alone, and so
cold. To be the last man on
earth....
The snow drives silently about
me, ceaselessly, drearily. And I
am isolated in this tiny white, indistinguishable
corner of a
blurred world, surely the loneliest
creature in the universe.
How many thousands of years is
it since I last knew the true companionship?
For a long time I
have been lonely, but there were
people, creatures of flesh and
blood. Now they are gone. Now I
have not even the stars to keep
me company, for they are all lost
in an infinity of snow and twilight
here below.
If only I could know how long
it has been since first I was imprisoned
upon the earth. It cannot
matter now. And yet some
vague dissatisfaction, some faint
instinct, asks over and over in
my throbbing ears: What year?
What year?
It was in the year 1930 that the
great thing began in my life.
There was then a very great man
who performed operations on his
fellows to compose their vitals—we
called such men surgeons.
John Granden wore the title
"Sir" before his name, in indication
of nobility by birth according
to the prevailing standards
in England. But surgery was
only a hobby of Sir John's, if I
must be precise, for, while he
had achieved an enormous reputation
as a surgeon, he always
felt that his real work lay in the
experimental end of his profession.
He was, in a way, a dreamer,
but a dreamer who could make
his dreams come true.
I was a very close friend of
Sir John's. In fact, we shared the
same apartments in London. I
have never forgotten that day
when he first mentioned to me
his momentous discovery. I had
just come in from a long sleigh-ride
in the country with Alice,
and I was seated drowsily in the
window-seat, writing idly in my
mind a description of the wind
and the snow and the grey twilight
of the evening. It is
strange, is it not, that my tale
should begin and end with the
snow and the twilight.
Sir John opened suddenly a
door at one end of the room and
came hurrying across to another
door. He looked at me, grinning
rather like a triumphant maniac.
"It's coming!" he cried, without
pausing, "I've almost got it!"
I smiled at him: he looked very
ludicrous at that moment.
"What have you got?" I asked.
"Good Lord, man, the Secret—the
Secret!" And then he was
gone again, the door closing
upon his victorious cry, "The
Secret!"
I was, of course, amused. But I
was also very much interested. I
knew Sir John well enough to
realize that, however amazing
his appearance might be, there
would be nothing absurd about
his "Secret"—whatever it was.
But it was useless to speculate. I
could only hope for enlightenment
at dinner. So I immersed myself
in one of the surgeon's volumes
from his fine Library of Imagination,
and waited.
I think the book was one of
Mr. H. G. Wells', probably "The
Sleeper Awakes," or some other
of his brilliant fantasies and
predictions, for I was in a mood
conducive to belief in almost
anything when, later, we sat
down together across the table. I
only wish I could give some idea
of the atmosphere that permeated
our apartments, the reality it
lent to whatever was vast and
amazing and strange. You could
then, whoever you are, understand
a little the ease with which
I accepted Sir John's new discovery.
He began to explain it to me at
once, as though he could keep it
to himself no longer.
"Did you think I had gone
mad, Dennell?" he asked. "I
quite wonder that I haven't.
Why, I have been studying for
many years—for most of my life—on
this problem. And, suddenly,
I have solved it! Or, rather, I
am afraid I have solved another
one much greater."
"Tell me about it, but for God's
sake don't be technical."
"Right," he said. Then he
paused. "Dennell, it's
magnificent!
It will change everything
that is in the world." His eyes
held mine suddenly with the fatality
of a hypnotist's. "Dennell,
it is the Secret of Eternal
Life," he said.
"Good Lord, Sir John!" I
cried, half inclined to laugh.
"I mean it," he said. "You
know I have spent most of my life
studying the processes of birth,
trying to find out precisely what
went on in the whole history of
conception."
"You have found out?"
"No, that is just what amuses
me. I have discovered something
else without knowing yet what
causes either process.
"I don't want to be technical,
and I know very little of what
actually takes place myself. But
I can try to give you some idea
of it."
It is thousands, perhaps millions
of years since Sir John
explained to me. What little I
understood at the time I may
have forgotten, yet I try to reproduce
what I can of his theory.
"In my study of the processes
of birth," he began, "I discovered
the rudiments of an action which
takes place in the bodies of both
men and women. There are certain
properties in the foods we
eat that remain in the body for
the reproduction of life, two distinct
Essences, so to speak, of
which one is retained by the
woman, another by the man. It is
the union of these two properties
that, of course, creates the child
(1).
"Now, I made a slight mistake
one day in experimenting with a
guinea-pig, and I re-arranged
certain organs which I need not
describe so that I thought I had
completely messed up the poor
creature's abdomen. It lived,
however, and I laid it aside. It
was some years later that I happened
to notice it again. It had
not given birth to any young,
but I was amazed to note that it
had apparently grown no older:
it seemed precisely in the same
state of growth in which I had
left it.
"From that I built up. I re-examined
the guinea-pig, and observed
it carefully. I need not detail
my studies. But in the end I
found that my 'mistake' had in
reality been a momentous discovery.
I found that I had only
to close certain organs, to re-arrange
certain ducts, and to
open certain dormant organs,
and,
mirabile dictu, the whole
process of reproduction was
changed.
"You have heard, of course,
that our bodies are continually
changing, hour by hour, minute
by minute, so that every few
years we have been literally reborn.
Some such principle as this
seems to operate in reproduction,
except that, instead of the old
body being replaced by the new,
and in its form, approximately,
the new body is created apart
from it. It is the creation of children
that causes us to die, it
would seem, because if this activity
is, so to speak, dammed up
or turned aside into new channels,
the reproduction operates
on the old body, renewing it continually
(2).
It is very obscure and
very absurd, is it not? But the
most absurd part of it is that it
is true. Whatever the true explanation
may be, the fact remains
that the operation can be
done, that it actually prolongs
life indefinitely, and that I alone
know the secret."
Sir John told me a very great
deal more, but, after all, I think
it amounted to little more than
this. It would be impossible for
me to express the great hold his
discovery took upon my mind the
moment he recounted it. From
the very first, under the spell of
his personality, I believed, and I
knew he was speaking the truth.
And it opened up before me new
vistas. I began to see myself become
suddenly eternal, never
again to know the fear of death.
I could see myself storing up,
century after century, an amplitude
of wisdom and experience
that would make me truly a god.
"Sir John!" I cried, long before
he was finished. "You must
perform that operation on me!"
"But, Dennell, you are too
hasty. You must not put yourself
so rashly into my hands."
"You have perfected the operation,
haven't you?"
"That is true," he said.
"You must try it out on somebody,
must you not?"
"Yes, of course. And yet—somehow,
Dennell, I am afraid. I
cannot help feeling that man is
not yet prepared for such a vast
thing. There are sacrifices. One
must give up love and all sensual
pleasure. This operation not only
takes away the mere fact of reproduction,
but it deprives one of
all the things that go with sex,
all love, all sense of beauty, all
feeling for poetry and the arts.
It leaves only the few emotions,
selfish emotions, that are necessary
to self-preservation. Do you
not see? One becomes an intellect,
nothing more—a cold apotheosis
of reason. And I, for one,
cannot face such a thing calmly."
(3)
"But, Sir John, like many
fears, it is largely horrible in the
foresight. After you have
changed your nature you cannot
regret it. What you are would be
as horrible an idea to you afterwards
as the thought of what you
will be seems now."
"True, true. I know it. But it is
hard to face, nevertheless."
"I am not afraid to face it."
"You do not understand it,
Dennell, I am afraid. And I wonder
whether you or I or any of us
on this earth are ready for such
a step. After all, to make a race
deathless, one should be sure it is
a perfect race."
(4)
"Sir John," I said, "it is not
you who have to face this, nor
any one else in the world till you
are ready. But I am firmly resolved,
and I demand it of you as
my friend."
Well, we argued much further,
but in the end I won. Sir John
promised to perform the operation
three days later.
... But do you perceive now
what I had forgotten during all
that discussion, the one thing I
had thought I could never forget
so long as I lived, not even for an
instant? It was my love for Alice—I
had forgotten that!
(5)
I cannot write here all the infinity
of emotions I experienced
later, when, with Alice in my
arms, it suddenly came upon me
what I had done. Ages ago—I
have forgotten how to feel. I
could name now a thousand feelings
I used to have, but I can no
longer even understand them.
For only the heart can understand
the heart, and the intellect
only the intellect.
With Alice in my arms, I told
the whole story. It was she who,
with her quick instinct, grasped
what I had never noticed
(6).
"But Carl!" she cried, "Don't
you see?—It will mean that we
can never be married!" And, for
the first time, I understood. If
only I could re-capture some
conception of that love! I have always
known, since the last shred
of comprehension slipped from
me, that I lost something very
wonderful when I lost love. But
what does it matter? I lost Alice
too, and I could not have known
love again without her.
We were very sad and very
tragic that night. For hours and
hours we argued the question
over. But I felt somewhat that I
was inextricably caught in my
fate, that I could not retreat
now from my resolve. I was perhaps,
very school-boyish, but I
felt that it would be cowardice to
back out now. But it was Alice
again who perceived a final aspect
of the matter.
"Carl," she said to me, her
lips very close to mine, "it need
not come between our love. After
all, ours would be a poor sort of
love if it were not more of the
mind than of the flesh. We shall
remain lovers, but we shall forget
mere carnal desire. I shall submit
to that operation too!"
(7)
And I could not shake her
from her resolve. I would speak
of danger that I could not let her
face. But, after the fashion of
women, she disarmed me with
the accusation that I did not love
her, that I did not want her love,
that I was trying to escape from
love. What answer had I for that,
but that I loved her and would do
anything in the world not to lose
her?
I have wondered sometimes
since whether we might have
known the love of the mind. Is
love something entirely of the
flesh, something created by an
ironic God merely to propagate
His race? Or can there be love
without emotion, love without
passion—love between two cold
intellects?
(8) I do not know. I did
not ask then. I accepted anything
that would make our way more
easy.
There is no need to draw out
the tale. Already my hand wavers,
and my time grows short.
Soon there will be no more of me,
no more of my tale—no more of
Mankind. There will be only the
snow, and the ice, and the cold ...
Three days later I entered
John's Hospital with Alice
on my arm. All my affairs—and
they were few
enough—were in
order. I had insisted that Alice
wait until I had come safely
through the operation, before
she submitted to it. I had been
carefully starved for two days,
and I was lost in an unreal world
of white walls and white clothes
and white lights, drunk with my
dreams of the future. When I
was wheeled into the operating
room on the long, hard table, for
a moment it shone with brilliant
distinctness, a neat, methodical
white chamber, tall and more or
less circular. Then I was beneath
the glare of soft white lights, and
the room faded into a misty
vagueness from which little steel
rays flashed and quivered from
silvery cold instruments. For a
moment our hands, Sir John's
and mine, gripped, and we were
saying good-bye—for a little
while—in the way men say these
things. Then I felt the warm
touch of Alice's lips upon mine,
and I felt sudden painful things I
cannot describe, that I could not
have described then. For a moment
I felt that I must rise and
cry out that I could not do it. But
the feeling passed, and I was
passive.
Something was pressed about
my mouth and nose, something
with an ethereal smell. Staring
eyes swam about me from behind
their white masks. I struggled
instinctively, but in vain—I was
held securely. Infinitesimal
points of light began to wave
back and forth on a pitch-black
background; a great hollow buzzing
echoed in my head. My head
seemed suddenly to have become
all throat, a great, cavernous,
empty throat in which sounds
and lights were mingled together,
in a swift rhythm, approaching,
receding eternally. Then, I
think, there were dreams. But I
have forgotten them....
I began to emerge from the effect
of the ether. Everything was
dim, but I could perceive Alice
beside me, and Sir John.
"Bravely done!" Sir John was
saying, and Alice, too, was saying
something, but I cannot remember
what. For a long while
we talked, I speaking the nonsense
of those who are coming
out from under ether, they teasing
me a little solemnly. But
after a little while I became
aware of the fact that they were
about to leave. Suddenly, God
knows why, I knew that they
must not leave. Something cried
in the back of my head that they
must stay—one cannot explain
these things, except by after
events. I began to press them to
remain, but they smiled and said
they must get their dinner. I
commanded them not to go; but
they spoke kindly and said they
would be back before long. I
think I even wept a little, like a
child, but Sir John said something
to the nurse, who began to
reason with me firmly, and then
they were gone, and somehow I
was asleep....
When I awoke again, my
head was fairly clear, but
there was an abominable reek of
ether all about me. The moment I
opened my eyes, I felt that something
had happened. I asked for
Sir John and for Alice. I saw a
swift, curious look that I could
not interpret come over the face
of the nurse, then she was calm
again, her countenance impassive.
She reassured me in quick
meaningless phrases, and told
me to sleep. But I could not
sleep: I was absolutely sure that
something had happened to
them, to my friend and to the
woman I loved. Yet all my insistence
profited me nothing, for
the nurses were a silent lot. Finally,
I think, they must have
given me a sleeping potion of
some sort, for I fell asleep again.
For two endless, chaotic days,
I saw nothing of either of them,
Alice or Sir John. I became more
and more agitated, the nurse
more and more taciturn. She
would only say that they had
gone away for a day or two.
And then, on the third day, I
found out. They thought I was
asleep. The night nurse had just
come in to relieve the other.
"Has he been asking about
them again?" she asked.
"Yes, poor fellow. I have hardly
managed to keep him quiet."
"We will have to keep it from
him until he is recovered fully."
There was a long pause, and I
could hardly control my labored
breathing.
"How sudden it was!" one of
them said. "To be killed like
that—" I heard no more, for I
leapt suddenly up in bed, crying
out.
"Quick! For God's sake, tell
me what has happened!" I
jumped to the floor and seized
one of them by the collar. She
was horrified. I shook her with a
superhuman strength.
"Tell me!" I shouted, "Tell me—Or
I'll—!" She told me—what
else could she do.
"They were killed in an accident,"
she gasped, "in a taxi—a
collision—the Strand—!"
(9) And
at that moment a crowd of nurses
and attendants arrived, called by
the other frantic woman, and
they put me to bed again.
I have no memory of the next
few days. I was in delirium, and
I was never told what I said during
my ravings. Nor can I express
the feelings I was saturated
with when at last I regained
my mind again. Between
my old emotions and any attempt
to put them into words, or
even to remember them, lies always
that insurmountable wall
of my Change. I cannot understand
what I must have felt, I
cannot express it.
I only know that for weeks I
was sunk in a misery beyond any
misery I had ever imagined before.
The only two friends I had
on earth were gone to me. I was
left alone. And, for the first time,
I began to see before me all these
endless years that would be the
same, dull, lonely.
Yet I recovered. I could feel
each day the growth of a strange
new vigor in my limbs, a vast
force that was something tangibly
expressive to eternal life.
Slowly my anguish began to die.
After a week more, I began to
understand how my emotions
were leaving me, how love and
beauty and everything of which
poetry was made—how all this
was going. I could not bear the
thought at first. I would look at
the golden sunlight and the blue
shadow of the wind, and I would
say,
"
God! How beautiful!" And
the words would echo meaninglessly
in my ears. Or I would remember
Alice's face, that face I
had once loved so inextinguishably,
and I would weep and clutch
my forehead, and clench my
fists, crying,
"
O God, how can I live without
her!" Yet there would be a little
strange fancy in my head at the
same moment, saying,
"
Who is this Alice? You know
no such person." And truly I
would wonder whether she had
ever existed
(10).
So, slowly, the old emotions
were shed away from me, and I
began to joy in a corresponding
growth of my mental perceptions.
I began to toy idly with
mathematical formulae I had
forgotten years ago, in the same
fashion that a poet toys with a
word and its shades of meaning.
I would look at everything with
new, seeing eyes, new perception,
and I would understand things I
had never understood before, because
formerly my emotions had
always occupied me more than
my thoughts.
And so the weeks went by,
until, one day, I was well.
What, after all, is the use
of this chronicle? Surely there
will never be men to read it. I
have heard them say that the
snow will never go. I will be buried,
it will be buried with me;
and it will be the end of us both.
Yet, somehow, it eases my weary
soul a little to write....
Need I say that I lived, thereafter,
many thousands of thousands
of years, until this day? I
cannot detail that life. It is a
long round of new, fantastic impressions,
coming dream-like,
one after another, melting into
each other. In looking back, as in
looking back upon dreams, I
seem to recall only a few isolated
periods clearly; and it seems
that my imagination must have
filled in the swift movement between
episodes. I think now, of
necessity, in terms of centuries
and millenniums, rather than
days and months.... The snow
blows terribly about my little
fire, and I know it will soon gather
courage to quench us both ...
Years passed, at first with a
sort of clear wonder. I
watched things that took place
everywhere in the world. I studied.
The other students were
much amazed to see me, a man of
thirty odd, coming back to college.
"But Judas, Dennell, you've already
got your Ph.D! What
more do you want?" So they
would all ask me. And I would
reply;
"I want an M.D. and an
F.R.C.S." I didn't tell them that
I wanted degrees in Law, too,
and in Biology and Chemistry,
in Architecture and Engineering,
in Psychology and Philosophy.
Even so, I believe they
thought me mad. But poor
fools! I would think. They can
hardly realize that I have all of
eternity before me to study.
I went to school for many decades.
I would pass from University
to University, leisurely
gathering all the fruits of every
subject I took up, revelling in
study as no student revelled ever
before. There was no need of
hurry in my life, no fear of death
too soon. There was a magnificence
of vigor in my body, and a
magnificence of vision and clarity
in my brain. I felt myself a
super-man. I had only to go on
storing up wisdom until the day
should come when all knowledge
of the world was mine, and then
I could command the world. I
had no need for hurry. O vast
life! How I gloried in my eternity!
And how little good it has
ever done me, by the irony of
God.
For several centuries, changing
my name and passing from
place to place, I continued my
studies. I had no consciousness
of monotony, for, to the intellect,
monotony cannot exist: it was
one of those emotions I had left
behind. One day, however, in the
year 2132, a great discovery was
made by a man called Zarentzov.
It had to do with the curvature
of space, quite changing the conceptions
that we had all followed
since Einstein. I had long ago
mastered the last detail of Einstein's
theory, as had, in time,
the rest of the world. I threw myself
immediately into the study
of this new, epoch-making conception.
To my amazement, it all
seemed to me curiously dim and
elusive. I could not quite grasp
what Zarentzov was trying to
formulate.
"Why," I cried, "the thing is a
monstrous fraud!" I went to the
professor of Physics in the University
I then attended, and I
told him it was a fraud, a huge
book of mere nonsense. He
looked at me rather pityingly.
"I am afraid, Modevski," he
said, addressing me by the name
I was at the time using, "I am
afraid you do not understand it,
that is all. When your mind has
broadened, you will. You should
apply yourself more carefully to
your Physics." But that angered
me, for I had mastered my Physics
before he was ever born. I
challenged him to explain the
theory. And he did! He put it,
obviously, in the clearest language
he could. Yet I understood
nothing. I stared at him dumbly,
until he shook his head impatiently,
saying that it was useless,
that if I could not grasp it
I would simply have to keep on
studying. I was stunned. I wandered
away in a daze.
For do you see what happened?
During all those years I
had studied ceaselessly, and my
mind had been clear and quick as
the day I first had left the hospital.
But all that time I had been
able only to remain what I was—an
extraordinarily intelligent
man of the twentieth century.
And the rest of the race had been
progressing! It had been swiftly
gathering knowledge and power
and ability all that time, faster
and faster, while I had been only
remaining still. And now here
was Zarentzov and the teachers
of the Universities, and, probably,
a hundred intelligent men,
who had all outstripped me! I
was being left behind
(11).
And that is what happened. I
need not dilate further upon it.
By the end of that century I had
been left behind by all the students
of the world, and I never
did understand Zarentzov. Other
men came with other theories,
and these theories were accepted
by the world. But I could not
understand them. My intellectual
life was at an end. I had
nothing more to understand. I
knew everything I was capable
of knowing, and, thenceforth, I
could only play wearily with the
old ideas
(12).
Many things happened in the
world. A time came when
the East and West, two mighty
unified hemispheres, rose up in
arms: the civil war of a planet. I
recall only chaotic visions of fire
and thunder and hell. It was all
incomprehensible to me: like a
bizarre dream, things happened,
people rushed about, but I never
knew what they were doing. I
lurked during all that time in a
tiny shuddering hole under the
city of Yokohama, and by a miracle
I survived. And the East
won. But it seems to have mattered
little who did win, for all
the world had become, in all except
its few remaining prejudices,
a single race, and nothing
was changed when it was all rebuilt
again, under a single government (13).
I saw the first of the strange
creatures who appeared among
us in the year 6371, men who
were later known to be from the
planet Venus
(14). But they were repulsed,
for they were savages
compared with the Earthmen, although
they were about equal to
the people of my own century,
1900. Those of them who did not
perish of the cold after the intense
warmth of their world, and
those who were not killed by our
hands, those few returned silently
home again. And I have
always regretted that I had not
the courage to go with them.
I watched a time when the
world reached perfection in mechanics,
when men could accomplish
anything with a touch of
the finger. Strange men, these
creatures of the hundredth century,
men with huge brains and
tiny shriveled bodies, atrophied
limbs, and slow, ponderous movements
on their little conveyances
(15).
It was I, with my ancient compunctions,
who shuddered when
at last they put to death all the
perverts, the criminals, and the
insane, ridding the world of the
scum for which they had no more
need. It was then that I was
forced to produce my tattered
old papers, proving my identity
and my story. They knew it was
true, in some strange fashion of
theirs, and, thereafter, I was
kept on exhibition as an archaic
survival
(16).
I saw the world made immortal
through the new invention of a
man called Kathol, who used
somewhat the same method "legend"
decreed had been used upon
me
(17). I observed the end of speech,
of all perceptions except one,
when men learned to communicate
directly by thought, and to
receive directly into the brain
all the myriad vibrations of the
universe
(18).
All these things I saw, and
more, until that time when there
was no more discovery, but a
Perfect World in which there
was no need for anything but
memory
(19). Men ceased to count
time at last. Several hundred
years after the 154th Dynasty
from the Last War, or, as we
would have counted in my time,
about 200,000 A.D., official records
of time were no longer kept
carefully. They fell into disuse.
Men began to forget years, to
forget time at all. Of what significance
was time when one
was immortal?
(20)
After long, long uncounted
centuries, a time came when
the days grew noticeably colder.
Slowly the winters became longer,
and the summers diminished
to but a month or two. Fierce
storms raged endlessly in winter,
and in summer sometimes there
was severe frost, sometimes
there was only frost. In the high
places and in the north and the
sub-equatorial south, the snow
came and would not go.
Men died by the thousands in
the higher latitudes. New York
became, after awhile, the furthest
habitable city north, an
arctic city, where warmth seldom
penetrated. And great fields of
ice began to make their way
southward, grinding before them
the brittle remains of civilizations,
covering over relentlessly
all of man's proud work.
Snow appeared in Florida and
Italy one summer. In the end,
snow was there always. Men
left New York, Chicago, Paris,
Yokohama, and everywhere they
traveled by the millions southward,
perishing as they went,
pursued by the snow and the
cold, and that inevitable field of
ice. They were feeble creatures
when the Cold first came upon
them, but I speak in terms of
thousands of years; and they
turned every weapon of science
to the recovery of their physical
power, for they foresaw that the
only chance for survival lay in a
hard, strong body. As for me, at
last I had found a use for my
few powers, for my physique
was the finest in that world. It
was but little comfort, however,
for we were all united in our
awful fear of that Cold and that
grinding field of Ice. All the
great cities were deserted. We
would catch silent, fearful
glimpses of them as we sped on
in our machines over the snow—great
hungry, haggard skeletons
of cities, shrouded in banks of
snow, snow that the wind rustled
through desolate streets where
the cream of human life once had
passed in calm security. Yet still
the Ice pursued. For men had
forgotten about that Last Ice
Age when they ceased to reckon
time, when they lost sight of the
future and steeped themselves in
memories. They had not remembered
that a time must come
when Ice would lie white and
smooth over all the earth, when
the sun would shine bleakly between
unending intervals of dim,
twilight snow and sleet
(21).
Slowly the Ice pursued us
down the earth, until all the feeble
remains of civilization were
gathered in Egypt and India and
South America. The deserts
flowered again, but the frost
would come always to bite the
tiny crops. For still the Ice came.
All the world now, but for a narrow
strip about the equator, was
one great silent desolate vista of
stark ice-plains, ice that brooded
above the hidden ruins of cities
that had endured for hundreds
of thousands of years. It was
terrible to imagine the awful
solitude and the endless twilight
that lay on these places, and the
grim snow, sailing in silence
over all....
(22)
It surrounded us on all sides,
until life remained only in a few
scattered clearings all about that
equator of the globe, with an
eternal fire going to hold away
the hungry Ice. Perpetual winter
reigned now; and we were becoming
terror-stricken beasts
that preyed on each other for a
life already doomed. Ah, but I, I
the archaic survival, I had my
revenge then, with my great
physique and strong jaws—God!
Let me think of something else.
Those men who lived upon each
other—it was horrible. And I
was one.
So inevitably the Ice
closed in.... One day the
men of our tiny clearing were
but a score. We huddled about
our dying fire of bones and stray
logs. We said nothing. We just
sat, in deep, wordless, thoughtless
silence. We were the last outpost
of Mankind.
I think suddenly something
very noble must have transformed
these creatures to a semblance
of what they had been of
old. I saw, in their eyes, the question
they sent from one to another,
and in every eye I saw that
the answer was, Yes. With one
accord they rose before my eyes
and, ignoring me as a baser
creature, they stripped away
their load of tattered rags and,
one by one, they stalked with
their tiny shrivelled limbs into
the shivering gale of swirling,
gusting snow, and disappeared.
And I was alone....
(23)
So am I alone now. I have written
this last fantastic history of
myself and of Mankind upon a
substance that will, I know, outlast
even the snow and the Ice—as
it has outlasted Mankind that
made it. It is the only thing with
which I have never parted. For
is it not irony that I should be
the historian of this race—I, a
savage, an "archaic survival?"
Why do I write? God knows, but
some instinct prompts me, although
there will never be men
to read
(24).
I have been sitting here, waiting,
and I have thought often of
Sir John and Alice, whom I
loved. Can it be that I am feeling
again, after all these ages, some
tiny portion of that emotion, that
great passion I once knew? I see
her face before me, the face I
have lost from my thoughts for
eons, and something is in it that
stirs my blood again. Her eyes
are half-closed and deep, her lips
are parted as though I could
crush them with an infinity of
wonder and discovery. O God! It
is love again, love that I thought
was lost! They have often smiled
upon me when I spoke of God,
and muttered about my foolish,
primitive superstitions. But they
are gone, and I am left who believe
in God, and surely there is
purpose in it.
I am cold, I have written. Ah,
I am frozen. My breath freezes as
it mingles with the air, and I can
hardly move my numbed fingers.
The Ice is closing over me, and I
cannot break it any longer. The
storm cries weirdly all about me
in the twilight, and I know this
is the end. The end of the world.
And I—I, the last man....
The last man....
... I am cold—cold....
But is it you, Alice? Is it you?
END.
=====
NOTES
=====
(1) - There are certain
properties in the foods we
eat that remain in the body for
the reproduction of life, two distinct
Essences, so to speak, of
which one is retained by the
woman, another by the man. It is
the union of these two properties
that, of course, creates the child.
The importance of nucleic acid, and specifically the structure of DNA, would not be discovered for another generation. The theory being expressed here is a biochemical version of
Henri Bergson's
elan vital, from
Creative Evolution (1907). It is of course wrong in detail, though it does
generally anticipate the roles of DNA and RNA in the cell.
(2) - "... It is the creation of children
that causes us to die, it
would seem, because if this activity
is, so to speak, dammed up
or turned aside into new channels,
the reproduction operates
on the old body, renewing it continually ..."
This is a restatement of a very old theory, dating back at least a couple of thousand millennia, to the effect that the vital essences are drained off by sexuality in general (and reproduction in particular), and that therefore sexual self-denial would preserve life indefinitely. It is quite true that frequent childbirth under pre-industrial conditions is likely to
shorten a woman's life, and the energetic pursuit of sex for reasons of danger and disease to shorten a man's. However, the existence disproof of this theory is that the celibate are
not, in fact, immortal -- nor are they exceptionally long-lived save by the operations of the aforementioned factors.
(3) - The idea that stopping the sex drive would also stop all other aesthetic, creative and indeed positive emotional impulses is very much a product of
Freudian psychological theory, and is almost certainly untrue. Not ony isn't sex
that central to even human psychology, but our affectionate emotions almost certainly derive from primitive mammalian ancestors, and specifically from maternal love and the desire to huddle for mutual warmth and protection. In many mammals, affection and sex are entirely divorced, and asexually-oriented humans are certainly capable of appreciating art or loving their friends and family: they lack
sex drive, rather than lacking all positive emotions.
(4) - "... And I wonder
whether you or I or any of us
on this earth are ready for such
a step. After all, to make a race
deathless, one should be sure it is
a perfect race."
This of course assumes that a "deathless" race could not change, or would never have the desire to change arising from purely rational motives. Both assumptions strike me as dubious, though they well might be true
as regards John Granden's specific procedure.
(5) - Mmm, so you've just had it explained to you that Granden's process will not only destroy your potency
and your sex drive, but also
all aesthetic and affectionate emotions, and it doesn't occur to you that going through this procedure might mess up your
marriage plans? Ah, those stiff-upper-life British types with their utter lack of common sense ...!
(6) - ... And Alice instantly perceives the obvious point which Dennell has missed.
(7) - Alice loves Dennell perhaps more than he deserves.
(8) - Here we see the limitations of any philosophy of positive affect in the time before the development of
game theory. First pioneered by
John von Neumann and outlined first in
On the Theory of Parlor Games (1928) and then in greater scope in a paper,
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944) co-written with Oskar Morgenstern, game theory gained wide acceptance in the 1950's. Its significance is that it shows why, in purely and coldly-logical terms, benevolence and cooperation are wise strategies. A lot of early science fiction assumes that utterly-rational beings would also be amoral and might be utterly-uncooperative: it is thanks to game theory that we now know that this is improbable.
(9) - Truly a
diablos ex machina, and one which obviously acts to reduce Dennell's emotional connections with the rest of the human race.
(10) - Dennell is incapable of understanding his old emotionally-tinged memories of Alice, or indeed of anything else which produced postive emotional affect in him. This is one of the reasons why I wouldn't volunteer for this process: immortality without emotional pleasure would be personally-meaningless.
(11) - This seems to assume that people are eternally-limited by the assumptions they first learned, which actually makes little sense if one has essentially unlimited wealth (a coldly-rational immortal could easily save enough money to invest in such a way as to become wealthy in half a century) and can continuously study. A more plausible explanation is that the very regenerative powers of the Granden Process are l
imiting the ability of Dennell's mind to form new neural connections and specifically to prune old ones. This would pose especial problems for an immortal, and note that by this point Dennell is something like 200 years old.
(12) - It's a bit surprising, though that in over 200 years of medical progress, nobody has figured out how to duplicate, improve or reverse the Granden Process,
even though Dennell knows the Process is possible and could presumably tell other scientists. This is of course a necessary assumption for the narrative.
(13) - This is something of a
Take That to the
Yellow Peril theories then very common, and popular in Interwar Era science-fiction. Wertenbaker (correctly, in my opinion) points out that after centuries of globalization, the very racial differences which frightened the theorists would have long since vanished as the races of Man merged into one. Even the cultures of East and West have by this time become one, to the point that the change of management is meaningless from Dennell's admittedly-cold point of view.
(14) - Much Interwar Era science-fiction deeply overestimated the difficulty of inter-planetary travel. It is of course
possible that a civilization thousands of years in advance of our time would either be unable or uninterested in the situation on the closest major terrestrial planet to their own, and of course 4500 years is enough time for two whole cycles of civilizations rising and falling.
(15) - The notion of men of the future as giant-brained creatures manipulating the physical world entirely by machinery dates back to the early 20th century, and can also be seen in
Stapledon's
Last and First Men (1930) and.
Hamilton's "
The Man Who Evolved" (1931) (which I once reviewed
here). The idea derives from the observation of human evolutionary changes from the other great apes, and is decades older even than "The Coming of the Ice" (which, however, pre-dates my other two examples of its application).
(16) - The irony here is that Dennell, who has been rendered emotionally-flat by the Granden Process, is emotionally-horrified by the cruelty of the 7th Millennial culture --
because he remembers a kinder and more sentimental civilization.
(17) - At this point humanity has well and truly passed by Dennell, because Kathol has reinvented the Granden Process. Dennell meant to be a god among men, but is now simply an archaic survival.
(18) - The development of universal human telepathy may have been the last flowering of the culture of the super-intelligent cyborgs, because if the Kathol Process works exactly like the Granden Process, it would logically freeze their further cultural development, probably in no more than a millennium.
(19) - From Dennell's point of view. Since he has only a very limited understanding of the culture of the telepathic super-intelligent cyborgs, who are far his intellectual superiors, this may be the apparent "perfection" of the human world as viewed by a domestic cat.
(20) - It seems obvious to me that the Perfect World has become highly-decadent -- as the events of the next section strongly imply.
(21) - Notice that the supposed "Perfect World" of ultimate technological development is unable to engage in large-scale climatological engineering? Or colonize other planets, or even handle a terrestrial migration competently. And they've forgotten about the last Ice Age,
despite the fact that they could simply ask Dennell about it. As I said, highly-decadent.
(22) - This is more than a mere Ice Age. It is a
Snowball Earth event. It is quite likely that the actions of the men of the Perfect World, as they lost their records and their science became myth, severely damaged the planetary atmosphere in such a way as to prevent the climate from stablizing at merely Pleistocene levels of temperature.
The last such event was the
Marinoan Glaciation, which lasted from 650-635 MYA. Neither this event, nor its timing, nor the very
possibility of Snowball Earth events, were known in the early 20th century when this story was written.
(23) - I would call it a surrender to an inevitability which became inevitable first largely through the arrogant ignorance of the men of the Perfect World, and then through their repeated underestimation of the threat until matters had gone too far for reversal. This is hardly "nobility," it's more like a tantrum at the unfriendliness of the Universe to the intellectually self-blinded. But then, Dennell is cold in more than one sense of the word, as indeed were the super-intelligent cyborgs.
(24) - What,
no one ever founded successful inter-planetary or inter-stellar colonies in
hundreds of millennia? And remember, the Kathol Process was not discovered until around 200,000 AD, so Mankind had lots of time before they froze their intellectual development. Though of course it's possible that the other descendants of the men of today are far more alien to Dennell than were the super-intelligent cyborgs. And of course Dennell has no way to actually contact them at this point: he's freezing to death somewhere near Earth's Equator.
===========
COMMENTS
===========
This is the story of a quest for Transcendence
gone horribly right. John Granden sought immortality because it is an obvious medical goal. Dennell wanted to become
immortal, despite the drawbacks of the process, because he was fascinated by the future and wanted to become a
god amongst men. And he indeed got to live for hundreds of thousands of years, eventually becoming the last man on Earth.
The price of this was literally his humanity. He lost the ability to have sex, to love, even to experience much in the way of any emotional affect. His mind -- merely-human despite his flattened emotions -- was unable to adapt much after a mere two centuries of life. He spent thousands of years hiding his true nature as the
world around him grew increasingly alien, and finally became a sort of
museum-piece, valued by the posthumans around him largely for his rarity. And he witnesses the (protracted and depressing)
end of the human race on Earth.
This is clearly meant as a cautionary tale. Had Dennell not undergone the Granden Process, he would have had a normal and perhaps happy life in the 20th century. Becoming immortal destroyed most of his ability to
experience happiness and eventually resulted in him living for hundreds of millennia in a world more alien to him than the 20th century would have been to an earlier human species. And there is a strong hint that when
humanity as a whole became immortal telepathic super-intelligent cyborgs, they lost their drive, leading to their ultimate extirpation on Earth (and possibly extinction in the Universe).
The nature of Dennell's life strikes me as nightmarish. He doesn't describe it that way, but then he has trouble experiencing any emotions at all.
Consider this: he enjoys something like 200 years of actually being able to understand the discoveries of the future. This is followed by more than 4,000 years of finding himself in an increasingly-alien world
which he cannot really understand no matter how hard he tries, surviving mainly because he got very good at survival over that first two centuries. Then, when he has to reveal his true identity and nature (because Earthly culture has evolved into something so cruel that it would kill him merely for being different) he spends
well over 200,000 years as a curiosity, living in a world that is now almost completely incomprehensible to him. He doesn't even seem to fully-grasp just how decadent the Perfect World has become until it is wiped out by a Snowball Earth event, probably because he only has the vaguest possible notion of how any of it works.
From a modern point of view, it is interesting and a bit puzzling how Earthly humanity manages to reach such a dead-end of development. By 6371 AD, Earth humans are far more advanced than are the Venusians, who are able (with an essentially 20th century culture) to carry out an (admittedly-unsuccessful) interplanetary invasion of the Earth. Yet at no point does Dennell mention human expansion beyond the Earth (though it is of course possible that the Venusians are themselves the descendants of human colonists from one of the preceding civilizational cycles, and humanity is now omnipresent in the Solar System and perhaps beyond, which
may be why the Earth-humans can't easily expand beyond the Earth).
Dennell also seems to take the claims of the Perfect World to its own ultimate perfection at face-value, despite the fact that at the time of narration he is completely aware that Earth-humans are extinct or very close to extinction. Part of this may be that he never really understands much of any culture much beyond the early 3rd millennium. Part of it may be that Dennell, while well-educated, doesn't seem to have much common sense at all. (Things might have been different for him had Alice become his fellow-immortal). And a big part of it is that writers of the Interwar Era had only very vague ideas as to the difficulty or ease of space travel compared to other possible future achievements.
In any case, this story is well-written, evocative, and packs a lot of Big Ideas into a small space while having great emotional impact. This is an excellent example of early Interwar Era science-fiction.
END.
