“That is quite clear,” Wyndham admitted; “and I can recognize it as logical probability, though it is less easy to accept as a possible eventuality; but may I ask”—and he could not entirely control his voice, as he said this, to the casual tone which he desired to use—“why you should be giving me this information? May I, perhaps, be privileged to watch such an experiment, so that I may describe it when I—” He was near to saying “When I wake: up,” but substituted “When I return to my own time,” as being more courteous to his auditor. For the denizens of a dream cannot desire to be made conscious of their own unsubstantiality, of which even the dreamer may not be aware while the dream endures. But was it really a dream?—if he could only be a little surer of that!
If—it was the next moment’s thought—if he could only awake! For the answer to which he was listening confirmed the worst of his secret dread: “You have—as I can see that you are sufficiently intelligent to anticipate—the exceptional honour of having been chosen from among millions of your time and race to be the subject of such an experiment.”
Wyndham Smith did not respond with an aspect of gratitude to this complimentary assurance. He strove to convince himself that the danger which appeared to threaten him was too remote from reality—too fantastic to fear. Yet if—indeed—
“May I ask whether, if I should submit to so strange an experience, I may ultimately be restored to my own identity?”
“I regret that I cannot reply to that question, for the answer, even if I know it, which you need not assume, will give information to the ego which will shortly control your body, which it might not be convenient for it to have. For the moment I must leave you, there being no more to say.”
As he spoke, the stranger rose from his seat and passed out through the solid-seeming wall, which gave way before him as having no substance whatever.
Wyndham Smith was left alone to consider the fate to which he was incredibly destined. It was a suggestion of fantastic horror, and yet—he remembered a remark which had been made by Professor Kortright at the lecture last Tuesday night. He had explained, as a surprising fact, that a man has no regard for the welfare of the corpuscles, even for the nerves of his own body, so long as he does not share their danger, or while they are powerless to hurt him with any message of their own pain.
He had said that the benefits which had resulted, in certain classes of operations, from the use of local, in addition to general anaesthetics, demonstrated that the general one does not prevent the torture of the isolated nerves, but only frustrates their efforts to awaken those of the brain itself to a kindred anguish.
Yet how many, he asked, would pay an extra fifty pounds, or even ten, to save the nerves of his own limb from such an experience, if assured that he himself would be unable to feel the pain? They would be roused to readier sympathy by some tale of the abuse of a dog in a distant town!
“I myself”—those had been the professor’s words, and in saying them had he not implied all the distinction between the ego and the inhabited body which had been the theme of their discourse of the previous half-hour?
With this thought, there came also the supposition that that lecture might have supplied the idea from which this dream was born. Surely that must be so, and—unutterable relief. It was no more than a dream—indeed, a dream therefore from which it must be possible to wake, and that waking Wyndham resolved that he would no longer delay. Not but that it might have been of interest to penetrate somewhat farther into the fantasy that the dream proposed—if only, while he did so, he could be sure that it were no more.
But the uncertainty was too great to be longer endured. He was resolved to wake from a nightmare which was become too real. And then he found that it was something he could not do. Surely you could wake from a dream? Surely, surely, when you strove to wake with your utmost will, with the whole mind concentrated on what must be the waking vision—the window opposite, which must be visible in the moonlit night (Wyndham remembered that there was a moon that was near the full), the bed-rail, the familiar walls…
But the familiar walls did not return. He saw only the ebonised, glassy surface through which the stranger had so absurdly, so impossibly, passed away. He would resolve for himself if it were substance or shadow that held him now. He rose and walked to the wall.
He felt a substance that was neither cold nor warm, being of the same temperature as the hand that he pressed against it. But otherwise it was polished granite to feel: granite-hard, granite-smooth. He paused at the place where his late companion had vanished, feeling it with patience and care. But it was all equally smooth, equally hard. Very surely it was a dream. But it was a dream that he could not break.
CHAPTER TWO
And now Wyndham Smith—if it were he, if he can be properly identified in that lithe, exotic figure in the single garment of purple, so different from the appearance of the medical student that he had been a few hours (or was it something more than two millenniums?) before—stretched himself on a bed. The hour must have been near to noon, for the sun shone downward into the roofless chamber from a blue cloud-flecked sky, but he was conscious of nothing strange in being stretched supine at the highest hour of the day.
He lay busy enough, for he was occupied with his own thoughts, and it was the only occupation that most men had in the only world that he now knew. For he knew nothing now of the experiences of the body which he had once controlled, to which its parents had given the title of Wyndham Smith.
Colpeck-4XP lay on the bed, remembering that he had agreed only yesterday that his ego should be transferred to that of a primitive of the commencement of the machine age, whose ego should have control of his own body for—it had not been clear for how long. Then he could not be Colpeck-4XP? He must, in reality, be Wyndham Smith. It was no use to resent that, as he oddly did. He was himself, and should be satisfied with his conscious life, and the control of so perfect and important a physical personality. If it were true that he had once inhabited the body of a primitive, half-witted savage of the early machine age, how unbelievably fortunate he now was!
Yet, queerly, all the force of a powerful intellect found itself in difficulty when it strove to persuade him thus. All the bodily consciousness which was not his own ego, but which had subserved another for many years, rose up in impatient protest against the alien control that it now felt, and, because his own consciousness worked through it, its resentment was not easy to thrust away.
Yet it must be done. He was aware, for it was a remembered conversation of yesterday, that the ego which would waken today in the body of Colpeck-4XP was to be that of the primitive, Wyndham Smith, and that the intention had been to discover how one of that early age would react to the traditions and environment that he would inherit with his new body—and to the world crisis which was to culminate before the end of the present day. A foolish, futile thing, for the event was agreed, and he had given his own ready assent. It was worthwhile, if only because it was an adventure of a kind, after the possibilities of adventure had long been lost to the hopes or fears of an ordered world.
He had agreed only yesterday about that, though perhaps with somewhat less alacrity than some others, for life was not entirely unpleasant, even in these terrible days—but he had agreed. At least—he?—or was it another who had assented then? He remembered the promise he had made yesterday afternoon that when he waked today he would review the whole question with a firm resolution to put aside all previous bias or decision, and face the sombre prospect anew. Well, he would do that fairly enough, useless as he knew it to be. For he would weigh that which was no less than a settled and certain thing. How far back should he now begin?
Perhaps it would be best to go back even to the very beginning of civilizations to the utter barbarism of the period from which he supposed that he himself had come. The time which had half-emerged from the primitive custom of manual labour, and had self-styled itself the Machine Age, having no imagination of the end of that far road on which it had taken the first blind, blundering steps.
Then they had made their crude machines with their own hardened, discoloured hands. They had not even realized, in a denseness difficult to comprehend, that the stored energies of the