III

And then suddenly the rufous man was touched by fantasy. His sleepiness had fallen from him altogether. He sat up brightly now. 'Look here!' he said. 'I've got an idea! Suppose—'

He paused. He produced that 'suppose' like a juicy fruit and hovered with his hand in the air for a voluptuous moment before he squeezed the juice from it.

'Suppose these cosmic rays come from Mars!'

'They come, I tell ye, from every direction,' said the old professor.

'Including Mars. Yes, Mars, that wizened elder brother of the planet Earth. Mars, where intelligent life has gone far beyond anything this planet has ever known. Mars, the planet which is being frozen out, exhausted, done for. Some of you may have read a book called The War of the Worlds—I forget who wrote it—Jules Verne, Conan Doyle, one of those fellows. But it told how the Martians invaded the world, wanted to colonize it, and exterminate mankind. Hopeless attempt! They couldn't stand the different atmospheric pressure, they couldn't stand the difference in gravitation; bacteria finished them up. Hopeless from the start. The only impossible thing in the story was to imagine that the Martians would be fools enough to try anything of the sort. But—'

He held up his hand and wagged his fingers with pleasure at his idea.

'Suppose they say up there: "Let's start varying and modifying life on the earth. Let's change it. Let's get at the human character and the human brain and make it Martian–minded. Let's stop having children on this rusty little old planet of ours, and let's change men until they become in effect our children. Let's get spiritual children there." D'you see? Martian minds in seasoned terrestrial bodies.'

'And so they start firing away at us with these cosmic rays!'

'And presently,' said the rufous man, almost gobbling with the excitement of his idea, 'presently when they have got the world Martianized—'

'I never heard such nonsense,' said the old professor and got up to go away. 'I tell ye these cosmic rays come from every direction.'

'And why shouldn't they use a sort of shrapnel?' said the rufous man to his retreating back. 'Shells full of these cosmic rays, so to speak, with a back–lash. Nothing impossible in that, is there?'

The old professor's back made no reply. And yet it had a certain eloquence.

'They'd probably begin with wild mutations,' somebody suggested after a pause; 'and then get more accurate.'

'It may have been going on for a long time,' said the quiet man, helpful as ever.

'You're assuming of course that they know a lot more about us than we know about them,' said the rising barrister.

'And isn't that easily possible?' the rufous man countered. 'Mars is the older planet. Far beyond us along the line of evolution. What we know is nothing to what they must know. They may be as able to look through us as we are to take a microscope and look through an amoeba. And when they have got the world Martianized, when they've started a race here with minds like their own and yet with bodies fit for earth, when they have practically interbred with us and ousted our strain, then they'll begin to send along their treasures, their apparatus—grafting their life on ours. Making men into their heirs and their continuations. Eh? Am I talking nonsense, Foxfield? Am I talking nonsense?'

'The jokes of today may become the facts of tomorrow,' said Foxfield. 'Nonsense pro tem, let us say.'

'I'm beginning to believe my own story,' said the rufous man. 'With your endorsement. It's wonderful.'

'But tell me,' said the lawyer, also a little excited by this strange idea, 'is there any evidence in confirmation? Any evidence at all? For example—has there been any increase of freaks and monsters in the world in the last few years?'

'It's only recently that there has been any attempt to give a statistical account of abnormalities and mutations,' said Foxfield. 'Monstrosities are hushed up—human monstrosities particularly. Even animal–breeders have a sort of shame about them, and wild creatures kill strange offspring instinctively. Every living creature seems to want to breed true. But from the fruitfly and plants and so on we know there is an amount of variation going on—much larger than everyday people imagine.'

'Mostly unfavourable variation though?' asked the barrister.

'Ninety–nine and nine–tenths per cent,' said Foxfield. 'With no survival value at all. Chance. Like the wildest experimenting….'