"Magic?"
"Of course. Have you even thought what kind of magic it is?"
"No."
"A big magic, such as you have worked, is just bringing the distant future into the present with a rush."
"Sarakoff had some such idea," I murmured. "He spoke of anticipating our evolution by centuries at one stroke."
"Exactly. That's magic. The question remains—is it black magic?" He crossed his thin legs and leaned back in the chair. "I got the Blue Disease the day before yesterday and since then I've thought more than I have ever done in all my life. When I read in the paper this morning that you said the Blue Disease conferred immortality on people I was not surprised. I had come to the same conclusion in a roundabout way. But I want to ask you one question. Did you know beforehand that it killed desire?"
"No. Neither Sarakoff nor I foresaw that."
"Well, if you had let me into your confidence before I could have told you that right away in the general principle contained in the saying that you can't eat your cake and have it. It's just another aspect of the law of the conservation of energy, isn't it?"
"I always had a doubt——"
"Naturally. It's intuitional. The laws of the universe are just intuitions put into words. You've carried out an enormous spiritual experiment to prove what all religions have always asserted however obscurely. All religion teaches that you can't eat your cake and have it. That's the essence of religion, and you, formerly a cut-and-dried scientist, have gone and proved it to the whole world for eternity. Rather odd, isn't it?"