IV

'I have been thinking lately,' began Davis, and halted. He had the phraseological unreadiness of the habitual writer.

'You spoke just now of stale religion,' he went on. 'Such a lot of things in life now are stale. Out of date…. I agree….'

He felt his way forward with his argument. 'I suppose—I suppose all the main working ideas that have held people together in communities have been getting out of date pretty rapidly in the last hundred years. Strange new influences have been at work—as we three at least are beginning to understand. But because human society is a going concern, the main working ideas have never been replaced. There never came a definite time to replace them. They have been used in new senses, made ambiguous, expanded, attenuated. Replacement was something too heroic altogether. But each time there was a patch–up there had to be fresh strains and fresh distortions. Old things got used for new purposes, and they did not stand the wear. So that—what shall I call it?—the social ideology—the social ideology has become a terrific accumulation of old clutter which now, simply through the wear and tear of terms misused, has come to mean anything or nothing. And to work less and less surely and safely…. Do I make myself plain, Keppel?'

'You put what I think better than I could myself.'

'I'm in entire agreement,' said the doctor. 'Go on.'

Mr. Davis pushed back his plate and folded his arms on the table, after the manner of Keppel. He spoke with care. He held on carefully to his argument and both men watched him.

'And you see, there is a vast number of reasonable practical people who—the more they realize the unsoundness, the rottenness, to put it brutally, of their ideological framework—the more they are, as one says, disillusioned, the more they are terrified at what may happen if this vast complex collapses….

'I have been,' he added after a momentary pause.

'Practically,' he amplified, 'my life work so far has been bolstering up what I thought were still sound working ideas. I began to see clearly through my own motives—for the first time….'

Keppel sat back and put his hands in his pockets. It was plain he liked what Davis had said. 'Here we are,' he said, 'in the palace of truth. And we find ourselves in virtual agreement that this world is as it were floating on a raft of rotting ideas, no longer firmly bound together, an accumulation of once sustaining institutions, customs, moral codes, loyalties, sapping one another, all so badly decayed and eaten away that in the aggregate they no longer amount to anything much better than a vast accumulation of driftwood—floating debris.'

'We all seem to be agreed on that. And now these new creatures from outside, these creatures we call Martians, are coming aboard our drifting system. With their hard, clear minds and their penetrating, unrelenting questions stinging our darkness as the stars sting the sky. Are they going to salvage us? Shall we let them even if they can? And if not what is going to happen to them and this mental raft of a world?'