9

That had been close upon two crowded years ago, and for all the intervening time Rud, with Bodisham perpetually at his elbow and Thirp going to and fro on the earth, had been struggling to make that day's victory real and to secure the absolute dominance of the Common World State against a vast complex of antagonisms, insubordinations, inertias, apathies, unanticipated administrative difficulties, physical difficulties imperfectly foreseen and sheer exhausting intricacies.

For the bare idea of a Common World State there was now a vast majority of mankind, but directly it was defined as a positive reorganisation of human affairs, as the establishment of a common economic system, a common education, a common transport system, free movement about the world, involving the rupture of a thousand boundaries and a readjustment of the daily routines of the great majority of lives, resistances began and grew. Mankind was quite ready to accept peace but not to seek peace and ensue it.

A great and intricate warfare in the human imagination had followed the obliteration of Reedly, attempts to explain, attempts to compel, misrepresentations, denigrations, glorifications, false simplifications, tactical and strategic lying, detractions, stupefactions, hysterical reactions, blind insurgence.

Gradually things began to fall into place as the idea that the Common World State had come to stay prevailed over the belief that it was merely a provisional arrangement, pending a satisfactory restoration and adjustment of old claims. Everywhere a larger proportion of people, especially in the younger generation, set itself to learn new ways of living and abandoned the thought of returning to the old routines. What had been Utopianism a few years before became normal common–sense, and romantic traditionalism retreated into that world of imaginative reality from which Utopianism had come.

The Group, with vastly increased resources and now everywhere in control, resumed its pre–war propaganda of world unity on an enormously enlarged scale. It was undercutting rival conceptions of life by withdrawing endowments and subsidies, taking over schools, taking possession of religious buildings in the name of art and history. It had deprived reactionary newspaper propaganda of the incentive of gross profits by its rigorous censorship of newspaper advertisement and by its separation of newspaper finance from general speculative activities. The complex public controls of economic life that had come into existence under war conditions were retained and amplified to carry on the peace. Profit–seeking production and distribution had already been squeezed into a mere corner of life; the main staple industries and housing and transport were already in the hands of the munition controls of the victors, and this time there was no storm of financial racketeering. Without a break the world war passed into world adjustment. This time there was no Peace Conference and no Peace Treaty.

The Group had found an unexpected amount of support from the world of scientific men. After a deliberate survey of contemporary fact the World Association for the Advancement of Science had produced a lucid and unemotional exposition of the attitude of the ever–multiplying class of scientific workers to the World Directorate. In less than two years after the coup d'etat that had made Rud World Director, the World Association produced its official declaration that the Common World State was also the Scientific State, and that the whole body of organised knowledge was definitely in support of the Directorate. In effect the scientific body was deliberately taking upon itself the role of the Church in the theory of Medieval Christendom, it was becoming the repository of knowledge, the directive power in education, and the criterion of all social organisation and readjustment. It was not so much proposing itself as tacitly becoming a new sort of Church, a progressive Church, a monistic congregationalism with ministers indeed, but without priest or pope.

Its declaration surveyed the biological situation with an unemotional explicitness. The human species had to adapt its life to the new conditions material inventions had created for it or perish. It embodied and applied ideas that were already apprehended by such liberal intelligences as old Doctor Carstall while Rud was still a rebellious undergraduate. They were now the universal ideas of the scientific world. Without world unification the species would destroy itself by the enlarged powers that had come to it. This, said the men of science, is no theory, no political alternative; it is a statement of fact. Men had to pool their political, economic and educational lives. There was no other way for them but a series of degenerative phases leading very plainly to extinction. They could not revert now. They had to go on—up or down. They had gone too far with civilisation and in societies, to sink back into a merely "animal" life again. The hold of the primates on life had always been a precarious one. Except where they were under human protection all the other great apes were extinct. Now plainly man had to go on to a larger life, a planetary existence, or perish in his turn.

The survival of a degenerate man, a sort of "poor white" in the kingdom of nature, was for many reasons unthinkable. These many reasons were given succinctly in the declaration. One that struck Rud with a sense of novelty was that the rats could do that sort of thing so much better.

Thus the men of science. That declaration had come to hand a few days ago, and Rud had read it with a certain feeling of self–applause. He had been doing what he had done in the name of the Common Man, but apparently he had been doing the right thing all the time. If he found anything to object to in this declaration it was that there was a certain failure in it to recognise his own guiding role in the release of the Scientific State.

There was an impressive array of signatures. He ran his eye down the list. Several were the names of men he knew to be in administrative positions. Then he saw "Richard Carstall."

He stopped short at that.

"Richard Carstall," he whispered. "Richard? Dick? Dick Carstall. That's the man! And I went to school with him at Hooplady House! And afterwards he was doing research at Camford. They gave him a fellowship the year before I came down. Old Carstall's son. Old Carstall the atheist, who made a job for Alf and Alf thought it was an answer to prayer!"

Afterwards he recalled that. He thought of Carstall in the night. He saw him tall and self–assured, telling him just what was "done" and just what one didn't do. Now as Rud contemplated the vast view from his balcony, that sustaining declaration came into his head again.

"They might have said all that two years ago," he remarked to the mountains and the sky. "But these scientific people always like to be quite sure of things before they do anything. I've been doing the heavy work while you've been theorising—and don't you forget that, Doctor, Professor, my good Lord Carstall. It's all natural forces and inevitable and all that—so you say now. But your theories are excellent, and I don't see why they shouldn't be made the basis of our new political education…

"I bear you no malice about it. None."

He went down the steps to the balcony on which he would have his breakfast.