“Arnold,” he cried, “would you believe that an end so carefully planned, so mastered in each detail, could be thwarted by an instant’s lack of balance? You remember that, of the three cylinders, one was already set a century ahead? That, save for the six months’ leeway that existed on all the dials, and was, therefore, immaterial—that one, calculated to the utmost nicety, leap-years and all, was the one I had selected for myself already. That was the one Esther entered. The dial upon the second cylinder I set in your presence, but omitted the four and twenty days. That was your cylinder. And the third—mine—do you remember?—was set to sixty-five.
“I removed this cylinder to a second vault of which you do not know. I awoke in 1980. Arnold, I entered it and forgot the dial! When I recovered strength—and I had supplied some food products to last me during that brief period of recovery—I hurried to this vault. I found only your cylinder, behind the fallen bricks. When I saw that you still slept I thought your mechanism had gone wrong. Then, going back to examine my cylinder, I realized the truth. I, who had loved Esther with all my power, and vowed with all my will to win her, I, a young man of twenty-five, must wait for five and thirty years before she awakened. When my time came to claim her I would be old. O, Esther, what I have endured during these years!”
The baffled love of half a life-span overcame him. I watched him, almost as shaken. The tyrant of half the world, greater than any man had been since the days when the Caesars reigned, he had bound himself to a more awful law than any he could contrive. It wrung my heart even then, the man’s grim hopes and long enduring love, checked by so slight a chance.
“I found Esther was gone,” continued Sanson presently, rising and beginning to pace the vault. “I might have re-entered my cylinder, but I did not know whether she survived in hers. I knew my ambitions claimed me, and my duty to save humanity and raise it up from the ape. Even she had to yield to that sacred and pitiful impulse. I learned soon that the cylinder which contained her had been discovered and adopted as a symbol of freedom. I found the world aflame and flung myself into the heart of the revolution. By will I made myself the master of men. In six months my dominance was unquestioned. I could have become supreme, but I chose to work through others, that I might have the leisure to devote myself to my plans for the regeneration of man. I have succeeded; I have made the world better, Arnold, and I have made it free. But now, when at last the reward of my long toil approaches, when at last I can show Esther what I have achieved for her, and lay the world at her feet, I am an old man, and the prize has turned to ashes.”
His grief conquered him again, and he paced the vault like a madman, weeping with all the abandonment of one who is above the need of conventional repressions. I remembered the antics of the crowd that followed me to the court. Sanson’s grief was as unrestrained as their malice. But I was brought back from pity by the realization of this new and dreadful complication. Sanson loved Esther still. And he had worked for her. I recalled her immature feminist views. He had believed her youthful impatience of authority rested upon as firm a conviction as his beliefs! He thought he had freed humanity. And all the uncountable wrongs of earth had been heaped up by him as a love-offering to lay at Esther’s feet.
I flung my prudence away. I clasped him by the hands.
“Sanson,” I pleaded, “don’t you see, don’t you understand what the world is today? Each age has its own cruelties and wrongs; but, if poverty has been abolished, have you not set a heavier yoke upon men’s necks? Their children torn from them, the death-house for the old, the vivisection table—”
“That is all true, Arnold,” he answered, “and sometimes, even now, that old, inherited weakness that men termed conscience stirs in me. That fatal atavistic folly!—for what is death, after all? A painless end, a placid journey into nothingness, a resolution of the material atoms into new forms, which shall, in turn, create that consciousness men used to term a soul. Their children? Bah! Arnold, through suffering we win upward. In the world-nation that is to come, the narrow, selfish instinct called parental love—a trick of Nature to ensure the rearing of the race—will not exist. It will have served its purpose. All I have done is nothing in comparison with the great secret now almost within my grasp. That is the meaning of the vivisection table—the research work that will enable me to offer man immortality!”
I recoiled in horror at the sight of the fearful fanaticism upon his face.
“Yes, it is that, Arnold, which I am almost ready to bestow upon the world!” he cried triumphantly. “The old problem of consciousness and tissue life on which we worked so long has practically been solved by means at my disposal in a civilized world. Then we shall live indeed. There will be no requirement that knowledge should progress painfully through the inheritance of our fathers’ labors. We ourselves shall climb the ladder of omniscience. The fit shall live forever, and we shall weed out the moron and defective without scruple, preserving a race of mortal slaves to labor for us in the factories and in the fields, holding them subdued by the threatened loss of that life which we shall control and permit to them so long as they are obedient. That is the noble climax of man’s aspirations. Immortal life, in these bodies of ours, and Esther mine, not for a span, but for eternity!”