I

'I wish, Keppel,' said Dr. Holdman Stedding, after a reflective pause, 'I wish you would say something about the world these starry folk of yours—of ours—are likely to make here. In my way, as you know, I'm an amateur of Utopias and Future Worlds—and, God, how unpleasant they are! They come tumbling into my collection now, a score or so every year. I sometimes wish I hadn't begun it. But if these star–men of yours do gradually spread a network of sanity about the world and stop what you call the Common Fool—Demos, Homo pseudo–sapiens—from ravening, grabbing, and destroying—just by barring his way, refusing to implement his silly impulses, and telling him plainly not to, then—can we, even in general terms, imagine the sort of world they are likely to make of it? What would a world of human beings that had, as Davis has put it, gone sane be like?'

'Let us admit,' said Keppel, 'that this is attempting the most impossible of tasks. The hypothesis is that these coming supermen are strong–witted, better–balanced, and altogether wiser than we are. How can we begin to put our imaginations into their minds and figure out what they will think or do? If our intelligences were as tall as theirs, we should be making their world now.'

'In general terms,' persuaded Dr. Holdman Stedding, gently obstetric as ever. 'Try.'

'Well, perhaps, in general terms, we may be able to say a few things at least about what their world will not be. You—what do you find in all these Utopias and Visions of the Future of yours? I suppose you get the same stuff over and over again, first of all caricatures of current novelties—skyscrapers five thousand feet high, aeroplanes at two thousand miles an hour, radio receivers on your wrist–watch; secondly, discursive minor novelties along the lines of current research; thirdly, attempts to be startling in artistic matters by putting it all in an insanely unusual and extravagant decor; and, finally, odd little fancies about sex relations and a scornfully critical attitude towards the present time. But these people of the future are invariably represented as being—I put it mildly—prigs and damned fools. World peace is assumed, but the atmosphere of security simply makes them seem rather aimless, fattish, and out of training. They are collectively up to nothing—or they are off in a storm of collective hysteria to conquer the moon or some remote nonsense of that sort. Imaginative starvation. They have apparently made no advances whatever in subtlety, delicacy, simplicity. Rather the reverse. They never say a witty thing; they never do a charming act. The general effect is of very pink, rather absurdly dressed celluloid dolls living on taboids in the glass lavatory. That's about true isn't it?'

'Lamentably so,' smiled the doctor. 'Nobody seems able to do much better. Some of 'em try to put it over portentously. Some make faces as they do it. But whether you preach about the Future or sneer about the Future, it remains, all the same; an empty sack that won't stand up.'

'Alternative to these progressive Utopias,' said Keppel, carefully not looking at Davis, 'the future world relapses into the romantic stench of a not very carefully preserved past?…You don't believe either story of course; none of us do; but the trouble is that we have no material in our minds out of which we can build a concrete vision of things to come. How can we see or feel the future until we have made the future and are actually there? All the same—'

'Yes?'

Dr. Holdman Stedding was amused to see his friend descending into the pit in which so many a prophet had preceded him and perished.