Chapter XVII: My Education Continued (2)

At first the prevailing idea was that all the studies and sciences needing exactitude of formulæ and result should be neglected by the community. On consideration it was felt that some of the most valuable stepping-stones to the loftier ideals of the future would be sacrificed if this were done. The other alternative was chosen. The inventors who had made the calculating machines were set on to find instruments which would accomplish what the mathematicians had had to do for the community. And, one after the other, the years had produced them. Even differential and integral calculus had been superseded by a series of machines that with little guidance worked out all the applications of their intricate formulæ to the sciences. As we advanced from department to department we watched these machines at work confirming the imaginative results of the physicists, the chemists, and the astronomers. The mathematical families were relieved of their duties and distributed, and every member of the scientific families was taught to use all these formulating instruments. Their brain-energy was not monopolised by calculations; the use of the machines was but a routine detail in their wider intellectual life, and absorbed so little of their energy that it seemed to have no effect on their faculties.

I was not many days in mastering the details of the formula-machines; for I had paid some attention to mathematics in my buried life and the memory of the subject rapidly revived. I soon came to see the wisdom of the Limanorans in eliminating the study from their scheme of education. It would have been the height of extravagance to waste long periods of their lives in studying and doing what a machine could do better. It was exactly the kind of work best done by a machine, for it had to do with a world rid of all conditions and, mathematically speaking, perfect. The inventors were still busy making new and simpler machines for the use of the scientists; and, though they had to know the new mathematical formulæ needed, they busied their brains rather with their practical application and with the machinery that would use them. It was imagination in the practice of mechanics rather than the mechanical use of methods and formulæ that they were engaged on. Hence it was that they avoided the old unpracticality of the mathematical families, and stood in no danger of thinking themselves infallible and the only treasuries of absolute truth.

One of the most interesting departments of Minella, as this great building was called, was that which contained the measurers of time. I was somewhat surprised that this department should exist, for I had admired every day the power the Limanorans had of telling to a minute fraction the passage of time. Their sense of time seemed to me to make watches and clocks superfluous. Even when the sky was clouded over and no heavenly body or light to be perceived, they could tell the exact fraction of the day or night that had passed, as I tested again and again by the watch I had brought with me. Their knowledge of the natural signs of the time of day or year had become instinctive and automatic through long centuries of daily use. The position and state of the petals of flowers would at any moment by day or night, by shine or cloud, reveal to them the time. So would the temperature of anything they touched, or, if it were highly contractile, its size. But these external signs were quite unnecessary. They had not to go beyond the sensations of their own bodies to tell the time or season. They knew by the intensity of the magnetism in them, by the acuteness of their senses, by the amount of energy they could command.

But their experiments needed far more exactness than even their senses could afford. Time had to be counted in their science not by mere seconds, but by the hundred-thousandth, or even the millionth, part of a second. One old-fashioned measurer of time was based on the length of a wave of sound as it passed through a vessel of water. The length of the vessel contained a round number of moltas (their smallest measure of length, perhaps about the millionth part of an inch); the vibration in the water reflected a bright light through a microscope and camera combined; and a photograph of the pulsations imprinted itself on a strip of irelium that kept moving with lightning swiftness across the focus; this strip was divided into minute sections, each of them corresponding to a lenta or millionth part of a second and numbered in order up to a million. A newer clock had its principle based on the length of a wave of light in a vacuum. Another and more convenient clock, or rather watch, consisted of an electric battery that kept a light irelium tongue vibrating; this latter controlled a graduated mechanism which pointed out on a face the exact lenta in the time of day that it was. It was small enough to be carried about on the person like a watch.

A similar microscopic minuteness of division appeared in all their weights and measures. They could weigh in their balances down to the million-millionth part of an ounce. So with their measurement of heat and cold; their thermometers could test ten thousand times the range of temperature that their senses could bear, although their power of endurance of fire and frost was to me something miraculous; their furnaces were able to volatilise the most refractory of metals and earths; they could reproduce the conditions of the most glowing suns, and also the temperature of the coldest interstellar space, which, age by age, they were bringing their frames gradually to bear with the aid of certain foods and combinations of elements. Thus did they hope in some future age to subsist, even when they ventured outside of the atmosphere of the earth.

All their measures were based on the decimal system, the fundamental unit for microscopic measurements being the amount of energy in an atom of one of their elements, and that for cosmic measurements the energy that would bring a beam of light from the sun’s surface to the earth’s. They were able to see at a glance the exact amount of energy in any phenomenon, to whatever sense it might appeal, and in their minds there was ever a common measure for all types of force. Their electrometers and magnetometers told not merely the amount of electricity or magnetism in any machine, material, or phenomenon, but the motive-power it would have when applied to any purpose. They could compare at a glance, without any elaborate calculations, the advantages to be obtained from any substance when using it as a force, whether through the electricity or the heat or the gravitational power to be obtained from it.

Especially useful was this common measure in dealing with the power of light as separate from that of heat. It was of great importance to them to know the exact amount of energy even in a beam of light which their eyes could not perceive. For they used sunshine as one of their great curative agencies, and the medical families were constantly experimenting on the effect of more or less light upon the microscopic life existing in and around the human body. One of their own new developments had been the consciousness of light all over their skin; they could tell with eyes shut whether it was the light of sun, stars, or moon, or an artificial light which was falling on any part of their body; the effect, even on the mind, differed completely in the four; the sunlight, or at least a certain amount of it, gave exhilaration or even joy; the starshine brought contemplative melancholy; the moonbeam mildly stirred the passions; whilst artificial light varied in its power of exhausting brain and nerve energy with the material or element that produced it.

Sunlight deprived of the intensity of its heat was to them one of the essentials of life. Its bactericidal power had been scientifically proved ages before, and a family had been set apart for testing its effects both qualitatively and quantitatively. It was not merely a loose knowledge that they had acquired of the antiseptic influence of sunshine. They had measured exactly its power of depriving microbes of their deadliness in the case of every disease; and they knew to a nicety how strong or weak it would be needed in order to check their ravages in any constitution, whether concentrated on a spot or diluted and spread as in a bath, how long daily its application would be required, and how many days. It was this family that superintended the sunbaths in their halls of medication, and assisted the medical sages in advising as to their use. It was true that daylight, and especially that of a sunny day, swept one third of the noxious life out of all water open to its influence, whilst the rays of the sun bleached most bacteria of their pestiferous tendency. Yet used indiscriminately sunshine became itself unwholesome, because of the other forms of energy besides light that it brought with it from the sun and the intervening spaces. If not used with caution, it would destroy the microscopic allies of human life in the body, rendering feeble the phagocytes that devour the virulent microbes; it would by its great heat injure the delicate tissues of the brain, and by its magnetism and weight press heavily on the nerves and the circulation. It was the duty of the solometric family to rid it of its unwholesome elements, and to indicate the exact amount and use of it that would be beneficial in every state of the body. Another of the duties of this family was to cultivate colonies of microbes of the various diseases and make them harmless by means of sunlight for use in inoculations against their own unmodified bacterial kin. One of their greatest aids in this process was the use of the water of the sea; wherever it did not kill the bacteria completely, it emphasised the bleaching power of sunlight over them and rendered them the allies of the human system in its struggle against all disease and decay. This sterilisation of disease was one of the most important functions of the family. It was they who led the flight-gambols of the Limanorans into the outer fringe of the atmosphere, where they might drink in the elixir of unadulterated sunshine; their guidance and contrivances were needed even there, in order to prevent the action of the other energies in the light growing deleterious. Even moonlight and starshine had their uses in the hands of this skilled family. They could separate the deadly or poisonous elements of moonbeams to help them in destroying bacterial life, and leave only their healthy and inspiring tendencies; thus dealt with, the rays of the moon gave a stimulus to the brain-tissues which worked up imaginative materials. And every star had, in their science, its own peculiar influence, sometimes malign, more commonly beneficial, when treated according to their wise discoveries.

Little of all this would have been possible without the inolan or measurer of light, one of the most delicate instruments they possessed. This was but a modification of the human eye as it had been developed in their bodies. It magnified the impression made on the lens so that it should move a small mirror delicately hung _in vacuo_; the reflection of this mirror ran along a graduated scale on which it recorded by bleaching a point of colour, the energy of light in the beam producing the movement. This recorded not merely the strength of the rays of which their eyes were conscious, but that of many octaves of light outside of the range of all human eyes. A more modern and delicate form of the inolan used a microscopic camera as the medium of measurement; this had accomplished new wonders in the way of measuring the power of rays from stars out of reach of the human eye. A third photometer, recently invented and still untested when I visited the collection of measurers, had made use of electricity in collecting and testing the quality and energy of beams of light.

In all of these forms of the inolan there was an arrangement for ridding each ray of its heat and of other forms of energy before it entered the lens; a thermometer measured the heat; and the other elements were absorbed and analysed by a subsidiary apparatus as the beam approached the inolan. Another modification of the apparatus had a prismatic arrangement attached to it, not unlike their inamar, and this broke up the beam of light into its colour components; the inolan measured each separate component, the length of its wave, and the energy required to produce it, its camera also recording in photographic form the metallic elements through which the beam had passed. A more recent modification, promising great results, was one which by means of a vacuum-lens recorded the dark beams that shone from unseen stellar bodies through the corona of our own or other suns. When fully developed they expected this to reveal the secrets of the darker depths of the heavens; the systems revolving round the stars would stand out clearly with all their elements for the investigation of the astronomic families.

Nor did the extraordinary refinement of these instruments, that were constantly being discovered, interfere in any way with the development of Limanoran senses. On the contrary they stimulated advance. Every new aid to any sense pointed the way to its improvement; and in a few years or generations this aid was rendered almost superfluous and a new and more delicate machine must be invented; for the combination of so many functions in the living body rendered the observations of any one sense less exact and trustworthy than those of a machine which had but one purpose.

Thus the evolution of the senses kept up an unending race with the evolution of fine machinery to aid them. Even the roughest, most material, and least specialised of all the senses, touch, had grown into something that was most delicate in its manipulation; and one of the most important parts of the education of my senses was to refine and develop it. They had specialised it to an astonishing degree. The lips, especially the outer edges of them, were able to distinguish the latent energy in any substance applied to them; whilst a delicate fringe of hair upon the upper lip, too minute to be seen by ordinary eyes, revealed to them the movements and character of gases and vapours that were so faint in their impulse as to be unrecognisable by the other senses. The measurement of force had been raised to a high point of exactness in their huge chests and shoulders. Their hands, within certain limits, felt temperature with the accuracy and minuteness of a thermometer. And the prehensile and manipulative skill of their fingers far surpassed that of the ablest European conjuror I had ever seen. Without any intention to outwit my senses, they would do things with their hands so swiftly that I could not follow the movements. It seemed to me at first as if they had more joints in their fingers than other human beings, so nimble were they; but this was not the case, although the arm had greater scope of movement than mine; in fact it seemed to move in the shoulder socket as in a universal joint, so freely could it revolve in all directions. Their joints were really more padded with cartilage than mine, so that there was more flexibility in the limbs along with greater firmness and strength.

Their nerves were also more magnetic than those of other men, conveying the messages to and from the brain and will-centres with far more swiftness and certitude. Indeed, if I were to find any one point in their systems which most differentiated them from European humanity, it was this increased and accelerated nerve-energy. For a long time their rapidity and ease of movement and action bewildered me; whilst I was deliberating what was to be done, they had done all that was needed. They had instruments for measuring the flash of thought from brain to hand and of sensation from hand to brain, and when tested at first, the swiftness of the message along my nerves was not one tithe of theirs, but when my education had somewhat advanced, this disparity was reduced by half. This advance was accomplished, not merely by practice, but by variety of diet and medication, and by living in a more magnetic atmosphere. I was often borne aloft into the purer air that fringes the envelope of our earth, and there, half-asleep, I drew into my system the electric elements which went to the quickening of my nerves. Down in the island everything that would excite me was avoided; the muscles and the other tissues of the body were exercised, whilst the nerves completely rested. Then they would be given gentle exercise of their own, to strengthen and make them supple, without unduly stimulating them. I soon began to feel the difference in the increasing nimbleness of my limbs and could move with more celerity and ease. The fingers were quicker to follow the eye. I grew what my old companions would have thought unerring in my aim and would have made a deadly shot with bullet or arrow in the wars of my native country. What was still better, the tips of my fingers came to be powerfully magnetic both in their appreciation of the electricity in any body they touched, and in actively producing magnetic currents. I was even able to cause a faint flash in the darkness by concentrating my will-power in my fingers, and waving them in the air.

POSTSCRIPT TO LIMANORA

When he had reached this point in his narrative, a striking instance of the result of his education occurred. It was getting towards the end of winter, and we who had our rules of thumb for the changes in the weather were looking for the equinoctial gales that harbinger the approach of spring. The days were lengthening, and the light of the sun was growing clear and strong upon our high-perched huts.

We had noticed a certain distraction in his manner, an absence of thought or of consciousness, when he was describing the development of his magnetic sense. And when he ceased for the night he could not rest but paced uneasily along our platform of cliff which overlooked the waters of the sound. The moon had begun to wane, and our weather lore bade us look out for storms at the beginning of her next phase. I could not go myself to rest for thinking of his strange narrative and the wonderful people he had sojourned amongst. I sat up many hours writing out what I could remember of his conversations and descriptions while it was still clear in my mind.

Some time after midnight I looked out and saw the silver moonshine on the still waters below and was attracted by the beauty of the scene. I had thought that he had retired, but I had scarcely seated myself on a projecting boss of rock that took in one of our widest views, when his musical voice startled me out of my reverie.

We fell into such sympathetic intercourse as the beauty of night often stimulates in two sleepless spirits meeting under the moon. He told me that the earth was then tremulous with suppressed passion, and that far off in his old home in the Pacific her heart was about to break. He felt waves of magnetic feeling pass through him, and they drew his soul back to Limanora. He knew that the spirits he loved there were yearning for him. For his heart quivered and throbbed with full memories of all he had known and experienced. There was anguish in the magnetic undulance vibrating across his being. It was not merely that a great storm was approaching; that he had known for some days. There were human pulsations in the ether which beat like an ocean upon his brain. That was why he could not rest. If only he could have his wings again, he would try to respond to the call. But it was useless with the recrudescence of his muddier humanity to attempt return by such aërial means. I offered to go with him on the morrow to the nearest city and charter a ship to carry us to his former home. But he would not listen to my proposal, and bade me seek rest and sleep.

I began to feel that I was intruding on the privacy of an agonised soul, and I bade him good-night and left him to his own thoughts.

The exhaustion of overcharged emotion soon let me drift into troubled unconsciousness. Dream followed dream like hurrying clouds over the moon. At dawn I woke in nightmare. The hut was shaking. I thought that I was still dreaming. But the swish of the rain and the lashing of the tree-branches on the roof soon made me understand. The calm of the night before had given way to tempest; and the earth was suffering rupture.

I remembered the prediction of our guest, and rushed to his hut. He was not there; nor could I conjecture whither he had gone. I thought he had taken shelter in the bush from the storm. Three days it lasted, and then we were able to go out and search the drenched forest. We followed up every track that he had been accustomed to take. We went to all his favourite haunts. But no trace could we find of him, though days were spent on the search. Then we forced our way through the dense undergrowth in several directions we had never seen him take; and at last we came upon a yawning chasm, which had every appearance of being newly opened. The precipitous side of the mountain had split, and a vast landslip had swept down it and filled the bottom of the gulf. We could not resist the natural conclusion; this was the tomb of our guest. After all his wanderings he had found appropriate resting-place. The earth he knew so well had taken him to her bosom.