The Grain of Dust: A Novel

by David Graham Phillips

"Then what?" asked Norman.

"Then immortality—in the body. Eternal youth and health. A body that is renewable much as any of our inanimate machines of the factory is renewable. Why not? So far as we know, no living thing ever dies except by violence. Disease—old age—they are quite as much violence as the knife and the bullet. What science can now do with these 'worms,' as my daughter calls them—that it will be able to do with the higher organisms."

"And the world would soon be jammed to the last acre," objected Norman.

Hallowell shrugged his shoulders. "Not at all. There will be no necessity to create new people, except to take the place of those who may be accidentally obliterated."

"But the world is dying—the earth, itself, I mean."

"True. But science may learn how to arrest that cooling process—or to adapt man to it. Or, it may be that when the world ceases to be inhabitable we shall have learned how to cross the star spaces, as I think I've suggested before. Then—we should simply find a planet in its youth somewhere, and migrate to it, as a man now moves to a new house when the old ceases to please him."

"That is a long flight of the fancy," said Norman.

"Long—but no stronger than the telegraph or the telephone. The trouble with us is that we have been long stupefied by the ignorant theological ideas of the universe—ideas that have come down to us from the childhood of the race. We haven't got used to the new era—the scientific era. And that is natural. Why, until less than three generations ago there was really no such thing as science."

"I hadn't thought of that," admitted Norman. "We certainly have got on very fast in those three generations."

"Rather fast. Not so fast, however, as we shall in the next three. Science—chemistry—is going speedily to change all the conditions of life because it will turn topsy-turvy all the ways of producing things—food, clothing, shelter. Less than two generations ago men lived much as they had for thousands of years. But it's very different to-day. It will be inconceivably different to-morrow."