THIS powerful and tragic story by the author of "The Man from the Atom" tells of a man who acquired terrestrial immortality—tells of a world many centuries hence—a time when everything is changed. This one man remains as a relic of the 20th century. He is alone with strangely developed human beings, the product of ages of evolution. Climatic changes are taking place. The world begins to grow cold. New York is almost in the Arctic region and Italy is covered with snow all the year around. In spite of their enormous intellectual development, all human beings must perish. Our hero alone can withstand the intense cold. He wanted eternal life and he got it—eternal life, purely intellectual. What does he do with all his years? And how does he enjoy them? Read this powerful story.
T is strange to be alone, and so cold. To be the last man on earth. . . .
The snow drives silently about me, ceaselessly, drearily. And I am isolated in this tiny white, indistinguishable corner of a blurred world, surely the loneliest creature in the universe. How many thousands of years is it since I last knew the true companionship? For a long time I have been lonely, but there were people, creatures of flesh and blood. Now they are gone. Now I have not even the stars to keep me company, for they are all lost in an infinity of snow and twilight above, as the earth is lost in its grey infinity here below.
If only I could know how long it has been since first I was imprisoned upon the earth. It cannot matter now. And yet some vague dissatisfaction, some faint instinct, asks over and over in my throbbing ears: What year? What year?
It was in the year 1930 that the great thing began in my life. There was then a very great man who performed operations upon his fellows to compose their vitals—we called such men surgeons. John Granden wore the title "Sir" before his name, in indication of nobility by birth according to the prevailing standards in England. But surgery was only a hobby of Sir John's, if I must be precise, for, while he had achieved an enormous reputation as a surgeon, he always felt that his real work lay in the experimental end of his profession. He was, in a way, a dreamer, but a dreamer who could make his dreams come true.
I was a very close friend of Sir John's. In fact, we shared the same apartments in London. I have never forgotten that day when he first mentioned to me his momentous discovery. I had just come in from a long sleigh-ride in the country with Alice, and I was seated drowsily in the window-seat, writing idly in my mind a description of the wind and the snow and the grey twilight of the evening. It is strange, is it not, that my tale should begin and end with the snow and the twilight.
Sir John opened suddenly a door at one end of the room and came hurrying across to another door. He looked at me, grinning rather like a triumphant maniac.
"It's coming!" he cried, without pausing, "I've almost got it!" I smiled at him: he looked very ludicrous at that moment.
"What have you got?" I asked.
"Good Lord, man, the Secret—the Secret!" And then he was gone again, the door closing upon his victorious cry, "The Secret!"'
I was, of course, amused. But I was also very much interested. I knew Sir John well enough to realize that, however amazing his appearance might be, there would be nothing absurd about his "Secret"—whatever it was. But it was useless to speculate. I could only hope for enlightenment at dinner. So I immersed myself in one of the surgeons' volumes from his fine Library of Imagination, and waited.
I think the book was one of Mr. H. G. Wells', probably "The Sleeper Awakes," or some other of his brilliant fantasies and predictions, for I was in a mood conducive to belief in almost anything when, later, we sat down together across the table. I only wish I could give some idea of the atmosphere that permeated our apartments, the reality it lent to whatever was vast and amazing and strange. You could then, whoever you are, understand a little the ease with which I accepted Sir John's new discovery.
He began to explain it to me at once, as though he could keep it to himself no longer,
"Did you think I had gone mad, Dennell?" he asked, "I quite wonder that I haven't. Why, I have been studying for many years—for most of my life—on this problem. And, suddenly, I have solved it! Or, rather, I am afraid I have solved another one much greater."
"Tell me about it," I suggested. "But for God's sake don't be technical." He smiled.
"Right," he said. Then he paused. "Dennell, it's magnificent! It will change the whole social order of the world. It will change everything that is in the world." His eyes held mine suddenly with the fatality of an hypnotist's. "Dennell, it is the Secret of Eternal Life," he said.
"Good Lord, Sir John!" I cried, half inclined to laugh.
"I mean it," he said. "You know I have spent most of my life studying the processes of birth, trying to find out precisely what went on in the whole history of conception."
"You have found out?"
"No, that is just what amuses me. I have discovered something else without knowing yet what causes either process.
"I don't want to be technical, and I know very little of what actually takes place myself. But I can try to give you some idea of it."
.. It is thousands, perhaps millions of years since Sir John explained to me. What little I understood at the time I may have forgotten since. Yet I try to reproduce what I can of his theory.
"In my study of the processes of birth," he began, "I discovered the rudiments of an action which takes place in the bodies of both men and women. There are certain properties in the foods we eat that remain in the body for the reproduction of life, two distinct Essences, so to speak, of which one is retained by the woman, another by the man. It is the union of these two properties that, of course, creates the child.
"Now, I made a slight mistake one day in experimenting with a guinea-pig, and I re-arranged certain organs which I need not describe so that I thought I had completely messed up the poor creature's abdomen. It lived, however, and I laid it aside.
