The Time Machine Chapter 6

Books at their time by Calming Anxiety, the Time Machine, Chapter 6, the Sunset of mankind.

A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that was their lack of interest. They would come to me with eager cries of astonishment like children, but like children they would very soon stop examining me, and wander away after some other toy. The dinner, after my conversational beginnings ended, I noted for the first time that almost all of those who had surrounded me at first were gone.

It was odd, too, how speedily I came to disregard these little people. I went out through the portal into the Sunlit world again as soon as my hunger was satisfied. I was continually meeting more of these men of the future who would follow me a little distance, chatter and laugh about me, and having smiled and just dislocated in a friendly way, leave me again to my own devices. The calm of the evening was upon the world as I emerged from the great hall, and the scene was lit by a warm glow of the setting sun.

At first things were very confusing. Everything was so entirely different from the world I had known, even the flowers. The big building I had left was situated on the slope of a broad river valley, but the Thames had shifted, perhaps a mile from its present position.

I resolved to mount to the summit of a crest, perhaps a mile and a half away, from which I could get a wider view of this hour planet in the year 800 and 27180.

For that, I should explain was the date the little dials of my machine had recorded. As I walked, I was watching for every impression that could possibly help to explain the condition of a ruinous splendor in which I found the world, for ruinous it was.

A little way up the hill, for instance, was a great heap of granite bound together by masses of aluminium, a vast labyrinth of precipitous walls and crumbled heaps, amidst which were thick heaps of very beautiful pagoda-like plants, nettles possibly, but wonderfully tinted with brown about leaves and incapable of stinging.

It was evidently the derelict remains of some vast structure, to what end built I could not determine. It was here that I was destined at a later date to have a very strange experience, the first intimation of a still stranger discovery, but of that I will speak in its proper place.

Looking around, with a sudden thought from a terrace on which I rested for a while, I realised that there were no small houses to be seen.

Apparently, the single house and possibly even the household had vanished. Here and there, among the greenery, were palace-like buildings, but the house and the cottage, from which form such characteristic features of our own English landscape, had disappeared. Communism said I to myself, and on the heels of that came another thought.

I looked at the half-dozen little figures that were following me, then in a flash, I perceived that all had the same form of costume, the same soft, hairless bazaarge, and the same girl-dish, rotundity of limb. It may seem strange, perhaps, that I had not noticed this before, but everything was so strange. Now, I saw the fact plainly enough in costume and in all the differences of texture and bearing that now mark off the sexes from each other.

These people of the future were alive, and the children seemed to my eyes to be but the miniature of their parents.

I judged then that the children of that time were extremely precocious, physically at least, and I found afterwards a abundant verification of my opinion.

Seeing the yees and security in which these people were living, I felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was after all one that would you expect.

For the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the institution of the family, and the differentiation of occupations are mere military necessities of an age of physical force.

Where population is balanced and abundant, much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the state.

Where violence comes but rarely and offspring are secure, there is less necessity. Indeed, there is no necessity for an efficient family and the specialization of the sexes with reference to their children's needs disappear.

We see some beginnings of this even in our own time, and in this future age it was complete.

This, I must remind you, was my speculation at the time. Later, I was to appreciate how far it felt short of the reality. While I was musing upon these things, my attention was attracted by a pretty little structure, like a well under a cupola.

I thought in a transitory way of the ordnance of wealth still existing, and then resumed the thread of my speculations.

There were no large buildings towards the top of the hill, and as my walking powers were evidently miraculous, I was presently left alone for the first time.

With a strange sense of freedom and adventure, I pushed on up to the crest. There, I found a seat of some yellow metal that I did not recognise, corroded in places with a kind of pinkish rust, and half smothered in soft moss, the armrest cast and filed into the resemblance of Griffin's heads.

I sat down on it, and I surveyed the broad view of our old world under the sunset of that long day.

It was as sweet and fair of you as any I have seen. The sun had already gone below the horizon, and the west was flaming gold, touched with some horizontal bars of purple and crimson.

Below was the valley of the Thames, in which the river lay like a band of burnished steel. It had already spoken of the great palaces dotted about among the variegated greenery, some in ruins and some still occupied.

Here and there rose a white and silvery figure in the waste garden of the earth. Here and there came a sharp vertical line of some capola and obelis. There were no hedges, no signs of property rights, no evidences of agriculture, the whole earth had become a garden.

So watching, I began to put my interpretation upon the things I had seen, and as it shaped itself to me that evening, my interpretation was something in this way.

Afterwards, I found I had only got half a truth or only a glimpse of one facet of the truth. It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity, upon the way. The ready sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first time, I began to realise an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are presently engaged.

And yet, come to think it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need. Security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life, the true civilising process that makes life more and more secure, had gone steadily onto a climax.

One triumph of a united humanity over nature had followed another. Things that had now made dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward, and the harvest was what I saw.

After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of today are still in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked, but a little department of the field of human disease. But, even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate pups at score or so of the wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can.

We improve our favourite plants and animals and how few they are, gradually by selected breeding.

Now, a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle.

We improve them gradually because our ideals are vague and tentative and our knowledge is very limited. But nature too is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Someday all this will be organised better.

This is the drift at the current in spite of the eddies. The whole world will be intelligent, educated and cooperating.

Things will move faster and faster towards the subjugation of nature. In the end, wisely and carefully, we shall readjust the balance of animal and vegetable life to suit our human needs.

This adjustment, I say, must have been done and done well, done indeed for all time in the space of time across which my time machine had left.

The air was free from nats, the earth was free from weeds or fungi, everywhere were fruits and sweet and delightful flowers, brilliant butterflies flew hither and tither.

The idea of preventative medicine was attained. Diseases had been stamped out. I saw no evidence of any contagious diseases during all my stay and I shall have to tell you later that even the process of purification and care had been profoundly affected by these changes.

Social triumphs too had been affected. I saw mankind housed in splendid shelters graciously clothed and as yet I found them engaged in no toil.

There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical struggle. The shop, the advertisement, traffic, all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world was gone.

It was natural on the golden evening that I should jump at the idea of social paradise. The difficulty of increasing population had been met, I guess, and population had ceased to increase.

But with this change in condition comes inevitability, the adaptations to change. What, unless biological science is a mass of areas, is the cause of human intelligence and vigor, hardship and freedom, conditions under which the act of strong and subtle survive, and the weaker go to the wall, conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint patience and decision.

And the institution of the family and the emotions that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness but offspring, parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers to the young.

Now, where are these imminent dangers? There is a sentiment arising and it will grow against connoble jealousy, against fierce maternity, against passion of all sorts, unnecessary things now, things that make us uncomfortable, savage animals, discord in a refined and pleasant life.

I thought the physical sliteness of the people, the lack of intelligence in those big abundant ruins, and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of nature, for after the battle comes quiet.

Humanity had been strong, energetic and intelligent, and he had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived, and now came the reaction of the altered conditions.

Under the new conditions are perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, but with us as is strength, this would become weakness.

Even in our own time, certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survive on, are a constant source of failure.

Physical courage and the love of a battle, prints an unno-great hate, in fact even a hindrance to a civilized man.

And in a state of physical balance and security, power, intellectual as well as physical, would be out of place.

For countless years, I judge there'd be no danger of war or solidarity, violence, no danger from wild beasts, no wasting disease to require strength of constitution, no need of toil.

For such a life, what we would call the weak are as well equipped as a strong, are indeed no longer weak, better equipped indeed they are, for the strong would be fretted by an energy for which there was no outlet.

No doubt, the exquisite beauty of the buildings I saw was the outcome of the last surging of the now purposeless energy of mankind.

Even this artistic impetus would last die away. It had almost died in the time I saw.

To adorn themselves with flowers to dance to sing in the sunlight, so much was left of the artistic spirit and no more.

Even that would fade in the end into a contented inactivity. We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity and it seemed to me here was that hateful grindstone broken at last.

As I stood there in the gathering dark, I thought that in this simple explanation I had mastered the problem of the world, mastered the whole secret of these delicious people.

Possibly, the checks they had devised for the increase of population had succeeded too well and their numbers had rather diminished than kept stationary.

But would account for the abandonment ruins. Very simple was my explanation, implausible enough as most wrong theories are.