His voice trailed off into ecstatic silence as his thoughts were lost in the inexpressible, and I knew that I was face-to-face with one who had seen—God. A reverent hush ensued for a moment as among those who are conscious of the benediction of an unseen Presence and the rush of mighty wings.

  “You spoke of the change in human institutions,” I asked him presently. “In what did this change consist and how was it effected?”

  “That’s a long story, and a sad story,” he answered, “and I’m going to let Iris tell it to see how well she remembers her history lesson. The young lady’s researches into the history of your time and the stormy period that followed it have earned her an enviable standing in her class. But first let us inhale, or as you would say, let’s eat. Althus, bring our new comrade a flask.”

  A young man left the group and returned in a moment with a jewelencrusted flask of glittering beauty that he uncorked and handed to me. Under the impression that I was being invited to imbibe something forbidden by the 18th Amendment, I raised the bottle to my lips.

  “No! Don’t drink it! Inhale it!” cried Therius. “It’s the essence of food.”

  Embarrassed at my error, I raised the flask to my nostrils. Immediately my whole being was permeated by a delicious and seductive fragrance. In a few moments the pangs of hunger, which had been annoying me for the last thirty minutes, were miraculously assuaged. As I continued to inhale under the captivation of the delicate perfume, I began to experience a feeling of surfeit as one does who has overeaten. I noticed that my companions, who had likewise been inhaling, were replacing their flasks in cunningly concealed pockets in their garments.

  “Does this constitute your entire diet?” I asked Therius. “Oh no,” he replied. “Although it satisfies every dietetic requirement, we can’t resist the temptation of biting into the luscious fruits that overburden our orchards and of partaking occasionally of the foamy concoctions and icy beverages that the ladies insist on serving at our social gatherings. It would be better—much better,” he went on academically, “if we denied ourselves these pleasures. I have every reason to fear,” he prophesied with the air of one predicting a cataclysmic disaster, “that if we continue these indulgences, somebody on this planet will someday be stricken with that ancient curse, the stomachache.”

  With much difficulty I restrained myself from bursting into hilarious laughter on observing from the serious expressions of these young people that a stomachache would be a matter of international concern.

  “By the way, comrade,” said Therius, “you have not yet told us your name. I am called Therius, as you may have already gathered. This young lady,” pointing to the beauty with the sea-green hair, “is, as you have heard me call her, Iris. This young man,” indicating a striking-looking youth, “is Heriod, and this lady,” pointing out a purple-haired vision, “is Lyria. It is needless to present them all, for you would forget their names, but you will learn them all in time. We have, as you see, dropped the surname, and for purposes of distinction have made it compulsory to resort to a greater diversity of Christian names. And your name, comrade?” he asked again.

  “My name,” I replied, likewise omitting my surname, “is Anthony.”

  “Ah!” said Iris, gazing at me with a new light in her beautiful eyes. “It was Anthony who lost the world—for love.”

  “It is well lost—for love.” I answered her—and what she saw in my eyes caused her to drop her own shyly while a faint blush suffused her cheeks. I was thrilled to the uttermost depths of my being that my green-haired sea goddess had been chosen to relate the changes leading up to the divine perfection which she so gloriously symbolized. Something, old as creation itself, had flashed between us in that first direct meeting of our eyes, defying time and leveling dimensions. In a low, vibrant voice that my soul drank in like music, she began:

  CHAPTER 3

  How It Happened

  “You will naturally know more of the events immediately preceding and embracing your own time than we. Hence, I shall not take up the story until about the year 1950. Your day was called by later historians the Age of the Great Unrest. It is especially interesting to us because in that epoch were set in visible motion the hitherto hidden forces that were to rock society to its foundation. From the very dawn of history momentous forces had been working in the shadow, shaping not so much the material destiny of man as the warp and woof of human character. These silent forces were dual. We have called them simply, as did some of your religionists, the Powers of Light and the Powers of Darkness. But you must understand exactly what we wish to signify by the terms we have appropriated. By the Powers of Light we understand all the innumerable agencies, visible and invisible, that have impelled man to broader freedom, greater happiness, and more perfect unfoldment of the latent powers within him. By the Powers of Darkness we designate everything that impels the soul to limitation, the mind to intolerance, the heart to selfishness, and the body to imperfection. All that man has accomplished materially, the institutions he has molded, the battles he has fought, the creeds he has believed, the civilizations he has created and destroyed, all these are but the visible reflections of that higher conflict that has gone on in his own nature between the two forces I have mentioned. Yet out of this very conflict with spiritual darkness was generated the desire for its opposite, spiritual light. And with the desire for that light came the wisdom to recognize it, the courage to fight for it, the will to attain it.

  “In your day the inner conflict had almost reached its climax as evidenced by the utter impossibility of remaining neutral. Like two opposing armies on the eve of a decisive battle, two mighty schools of thought lined up against each other. One school represented the soul-killing tendencies that had created standardization, competition, and inhibitory creeds and institutions, which the soul of man had long ago outgrown and repudiated. The other school espoused the cause of higher freedom, greater tolerance, and escape from standardization. Like a grim juggernaut crushing everything that stood in its path, the chariot of diabolical ‘efficiency’ rolled on and either converted all men into cogs in its machinery or crushed them to powder under its wheels. In your day the odds were decidedly in favor of the Powers of Darkness. The World-Trust was beginning to emerge from the wreck of private ownership: absorbing independent enterprises and preparing to absorb the functions of government.

  “All this would have been very well had the right motive been behind it, had it been possible for the soul to emerge alive from the process. Surely the centralization of the means of production and distribution means the elimination of waste, the conservation of energy, and thereby the creation of leisure for the soul to expand. But it didn’t work out that way. The same diabolical powers that had brought private ownership to its highest expressions, foreseeing its inevitable decline, began to retract their own gospel. They established a travesty of Socialism—dictatorial, merciless—with themselves as dictators. Instead of shortening the hours of labor they employed an army of experts to devise new tasks of increasing complexity. With the collapse of private enterprise the former middle classes and finally the upper strata of the social structure collapsed into the ranks of labor.

  “To insure the continuance of their system, the dictators, after binding men’s bodies to their giant machines, began to attack the hitherto impregnable fortresses of mind. Always before in the course of history, whenever human freedom had been seriously menaced, a leader had arisen. A thinker had always emerged, often from the very ranks of the oppressed, who, keeping his mind alert and his ideals uncontaminated, had inspired his comrades to revolt. ‘But now—’ so swore the Dictators in their secret councils, ‘there shall be no more thinking on the part of the masses, save such thoughts as we, their masters, shall implant in the mass mind.’ Controlling all employment, since the crumbling governments had long since disclaimed any responsibility in the matter of whether their subjects should work or starve, the Dictators finally issued what was later referred to as ‘The Unspeakable Manifesto.’

  “‘We have created jobs for all,’ they proclaimed grandiloquently, through the medium of the subsidized press. ‘We have, therefore, suspended all agencies of charity supported by our capital, for where there is employment for all, and compensation for such as we find unfit to labor, there is no further need of charity. There is no longer an excuse for idleness, and he who will not work must starve.’”

  The Unspeakable Manifesto

  “Yes, there were jobs for all, but at what a price! Oh, my comrade, that I might mercifully veil from your eyes this stain on civilization! But you must understand if you are to comprehend what followed.

  “At this time surgery had reached a perfection hitherto unattained in the annals of science. The human brain had been probed and altered so that by means of safe and simple operations criminal tendencies could be eradicated and the channels of higher thought opened for the expression of latent genius. But no such altruistic motive guided the scalpels of the hired surgeons of the Industrial Dictators. To make a long story short, this is what they were employed to do.

  “First under the guise of ‘vocational treatments,’ and later brazenly and openly under the name of ‘vocational operations,’ they compelled every applicant for employment to submit to cerebral surgery. The aim of the operation was twofold: to block the brain paths of creative thinking, and to concentrate all the energies of the mind on the particular task for which the victim was selected.

  “This began the creation of a race of human robots, each a highly specialized machine for the performance of his appointed task, incapable of thinking on any other subject, and hence incapable of revolt or even discontent.

  “This horror of the ages might have gone on until the humanity of our planet had become a soulless menace to the universe had not youth intervened. Even in your time the Revolt of the Youth was beginning to assume alarming proportions. Toward the false psychology that had been deliberately foisted on the credulous masses through the channels of a corrupted press, a tainted educational system, and a fossilized religion, the younger generation maintained a mocking indifference. If pressed too far this indifference flared into open rebellion. The age-old fetishes of the flag, the altar, and the home were discarded by these clear-eyed, strong-limbed, clean-minded youngsters, along with their belief in storks and Santa Claus. They had seen the flag used as an appeal to selfish interests, they had seen Mammon enthroned on the altar of God, they had seen the home desecrated and broken by the force of economic pressure.

  “Between the youngsters and the elders of that day a gap in evolution yawned and widened. The thinking processes of these youths were as logical as those of their elders were muddled. Their minds drove straight to conclusions, exposed in the subtlest motives, and laughed in the face of superstition. In the dawn light of their awakening they said that the idols of the elders had brought them nothing but chains and slavery. They boldly stated that if life were nothing more than a senseless circle of its own perpetuation, that if man’s sole duty was to reproduce his kind, foregoing all happiness for the sake of those who must likewise forego all happiness for the generation that should follow them and so on ad infinitum, then life was not worth living. They looked back on the life process and found its meaning. They proclaimed the gospel of human happiness as the purpose of life and the perpetuation of happiness as the reason for perpetuating life.

  “They went too far, of course, in their rebellion. In their resentment against the old they often discarded principles that might have strengthened the fabric of the new. In their hatred of pain they often grasped the transitory pleasures of the moment rather than building for permanent and enduring contentment. In time, however, they swung back to normal and by the time that the first cerebral ‘vocational operations’ were performed they had settled down grimly to the business of consistent, organized revolt. Everywhere that youth flaunted itself, rebellion flared—and youth was everywhere. Swelling the ranks of the army and navy, in the fields of scientific research, even under the parental frown of the Industrial Dictators—everywhere, rebellion spread like wildfire. The cerebral specialists were hunted down like rats and death, swift and untraceable, met them at every turn. It was a case of father against son, of mother against daughter. The hypnotized elders had been thoroughly convinced that youth’s rebellion against ‘sacred institutions’ was a contagious insanity that only the surgeon’s knife could cure. Still bound hand and foot by creeds of fire and brimstone, they were inflamed by the hired ministers of Mammon to make a sacrifice of their children’s splendid intellects, to save their souls from Hell.

  “But youth was not alone in its conflict, for many true reformers, scientists, and radicals rallied to its side. Yet it must be borne in mind that it was the oncoming tide of youth that engulfed these movements rather than that youth enlisted under their banners. This accounts for the synthesis of thought that emerged from the fusion of these various philosophies into one mighty movement that was broad enough to include them all, and to unite them for one purpose.

  “Then came war! Revolution, bloody and horrible beyond the dreams of Hell! Inventions of diabolic destructiveness were loosed on both sides, but it was a young scientist of the rebellion who perfected the disintegrating ray.

  “In the wake of this crumbling terror, vengeance followed swift and merciless. Armies melted into atoms, cities crumbled into dust, and mountains toppled in the sea. It all culminated with that ghastly midnight carnage known as the Slaughter of the Ancients. Horrible and unnatural as it may seem, this annihilation of one generation by its offspring, it was a thing that had to be. Again the Inexorable Law had spoken. Nature herself had entered the lists on the side of progress and the fittest had survived.

  CHAPTER 4

  The New Chivalry

  “In the year 1955, peace was restored to the stricken planet, reconstruction began, and the World-State elected a woman, known as the World President, as its chief executive. This was before the establishment of the monarchy.

  “Any narration of the Great Revolt would be incomplete without a description of the changes that took place in the status of woman. In your day woman was just beginning to demand and attain economic equality with man. Shortly afterward she demanded and secured the establishment of a single code of morals. Man met these demands sullenly and retaliated for every inch of ground that he was forced to yield by a lessening of his chivalry. This only proved to woman that his chivalry was without any foundation save that of a sneering deference to weakness. The knighthood of the ages was but a sugar-coated pill that concealed a soul-killing poison, an opiate to drug the intellect. This discovery embittered woman and almost caused a war among the sexes. The ultra-feminists began to acquaint the world with the true status of the case. They began to demand chivalry, but not as an opiate to lull the reason into submission to a sex whose last claim to superiority had been undermined. They demanded it as a tribute still due to those who were more than equals because of the sacrifice they still endured in giving birth to man. Man met this demand with taunts and insults. Woman gave him his choice between the restoration of chivalry and the surrender of his ancient privileges, even the surrender of his parenthood. She grimly stated that it were better for humanity to die painlessly through the ceasing of birth than to commit suicide through the continuance of manmade institutions.

  “Chivalry was restored. There was nothing else to do. Notwithstanding, woman in her new bigness that had come to her through the broadening influences of her new freedom was not inclined to add humiliation to her victory. She sweetened man’s defeat with such queenly graciousness that eventually the new chivalry came to have a real foundation. Men, casting aside the childishness that had always made woman regard them maternally rather than as comrades, became real men, men who were big enough to give honor where honor was due, and in addition to chivalry came also mutual respect. Today in our newfound immortality, with the burden of childbearing practically lifted, woman is still accorded chivalry. This is necessary because of her more delicate organism, whose very delicacy must be conserved and perpetuated if she is to exercise, for the benefit of all humanity, her finer sensibilities. Woman has found her compensation for motherhood as the mother of the World-State. She is supreme in the realm of the government. She has enlarged the scope of maternity and the four walls of her home to include the spiritual and intellectual guidance of our planet, the home of the human race.

  “Naturally, the functions of government today are, as you have already learned, vastly different from its functions in your time. Concerned now with education, with the patronage of art, science, and literature, with the beautification and spiritualization of all life, it finds in woman its ideal director. Man still leads in invention, mechanics, mathematics, and the more strenuous sports. Woman has ceased to imitate man, being content in her own sphere. She has intensified her femininity, wherever it can be done without a sacrifice of her health and freedom. Thus she has preserved that pleasing contrast in the sexes which perpetuates their appeal for one another.

  “All this is a digression and a glimpse into times far beyond the Revolution but it will enable you to understand our present social values. This feminist movement was not distinct from the Revolt of Youth, but was concurrent with it. There might have been an open war between the sexes had woman not played such a glorious part in the Revolution and had not the memory of sufferings shared together in the Great Rebellion softened the bitterness of the sex strife.

  “With youth triumphant a glorious era was ushered in and true Socialism was established. The soul, the higher nature of man, with infinite leisure to unfold, blossomed in beauty and soared to heights of achievement hitherto undreamed of. Forever casting off the old puritanical idea that earthly happiness is a thing to be rejected in order to purchase a hypothetical paradise beyond, man reached forth his hand and gathered the joy and plenty that have always lain within his reach. Disease and death yielded before the ‘consciousness of immortality’; crime and repression vanished simultaneously with the ‘consciousness of sin’ and the lifting of poverty. Great inventions were perfected, making life’s necessities attainable by a maximum of two hours’ daily labor, and man, freed from the ancient curse of toil, raised his head from the ground and began to explore the infinite.”