Chapter I: Discoveries (2)

During the next great period of discovery the Sidramo superseded this use of alfarene by a more rapid method of concentrating air. As usual they followed up the steps of the Floramo, and created what the botanical families had found in nature. The use of great pressure in the manufacture of the sustenant globules in their final form suggested the track they should take; and the immense accumulation of energy in Rimla and the rapidly increasing faculty of concentrating it on any point or purpose gave them the requisite power. They came to reduce air to liquid, and finally to solid and permanent, form. And, following up the lead of this discovery, they applied greater and greater pressures, and were at last able to transform with ease and without danger any element into gaseous, liquid, or solid form. They contracted the slow processes, that in terrestrial nature covered myriads of ages, into a few minutes or hours, and thus again multiplied indefinitely their vast treasures of power in Rimla.

A pioneering production, the book of elemental transformations, foreshadowed the discoveries to which this would lead. Ether, it was shown, would be transformed into any desired substance, as soon as its constituents and formation were found out. Even modes of motion, like sound and light and electricity, would, with this vast expansion of the possibility of compression, and the growing power of amalgamating and concentrating forms of energy, come to be bottled up in liquid or solid form for any required period. A block of latent sound or latent light or latent electricity would be as common as a block of ice. Another pioneer, the book of abbreviation of geological time, opened up a second vista of power that the discovery pointed out. Nature took geological ages to perform most of her processes; but in great passions she accomplished as much in a few minutes. The safe imitation of these creative and destructive paroxysms was certain to be one of the conquests of Limanoran posterity. For the actual concentration of power in Rimla was as nothing compared with what it would be in the future. Now they were able to contract the work of years into minutes; then would they be able to leap in one moment across geological ages. Time was the inertia of realisation and creative power. The whole drift of their civilisation was towards the mastery of finite periods of time. Years were to them what minutes had been to their ancestry; to their far posterity geological ages would be as brief as years were to them. Swifter and more swiftly would they eliminate from their creative processes the reluctant element of time, and feel that they were pacing in the footsteps of eternity.

As it was, they soon put the liquefaction and solidification of the elements to countless uses. A few of these were the cooling of their buildings by concentrated air, the use in the arts of its corrosive power and of its power of rendering most metals easily plastic, its amalgamation with other elements into an explosive matter so destructive as to supersede the use of the leomoran in earth-perforation, and the storage of their faleenas with supplies for expeditions that would take years in interstellar space.

A minor use to which they put alfarene was the production of vacuums. They had long had mechanical air-pumps, that gave them the vacuums they needed for their experiments. But they now found it much easier to enclose one of these snow-stunted shrubs in an air-tight vessel of transparent irelium, and watch it absorb the air within the walls. The energy formerly spent on the making of air-pumps was saved, and devoted to some other useful purpose.

What was still better was the continual experimentation on the human system carried on by means of these so easily accessible vacuums. The alfarene vacuum became the daily plaything of the Limanoran, and he took pleasure in finding out the needs of his body in it, and the length of time he could endure the pure ether. It was not long before they knew every difficulty they would be likely to encounter in crossing from star to star. The minor defects of the body were easily met after a few years’ study of them by the various scientific families. But two gave them long pause.

One was the intense cold they were sure to experience. Where there was no terrene matter or moisture or air to retain the solar or astral heat that travelled through space, the diffusion of the streams of thermal energy would render any far voyaging from the earth impracticable. The experiments to meet this difficulty took three directions. One was physiological,--to make the body capable of resisting as great a degree of cold as they would be likely to encounter; this attempt was only partially successful, and that by slow steps. They brought themselves to live with pleasure in any cold that could be found in or around the earth; but it would take many centuries, perhaps geological ages, to bring endurance up to the pitch of interstellar cold; it would in fact mean such a sublimation of their bodies as would make them like spirits. Another direction was chemical,--to produce a regular atmosphere round the body as it flew, so that it might retain some of the streams of heat that swept past it; the use of the essence of the oxygen-plant helped them in this direction to some extent; but the amount of it that would be needed to keep up such an atmosphere for years, concentrate it as much as they liked, meant so huge a cargo that none of their winged cars would be able to bear it above the earth. The third direction was physical,--to produce as much heat around the body as would act as a shield against the cold of the ether; this was the most successful; for there were such torrents of energy ever moving through interstellar space that it merely needed its utilisation to solve the problem. One plan, that, when carefully developed, would ensure success, was a magnetic garment which would cover the whole of the body and draw to it all the electric energy within a large radius of it, to be transformed into heat by minute engines distributed all over the envelope. Another was, to combine the mechanical collection of electricity from the ether and the full development of the magnetic powers of the body. Already they had been able to flash lightnings around them as they flew through the night; and it would need but small mechanical manipulation to increase this display and to turn it into heat. Like meteors, they would blaze across space, wrapped in a mantle of flame.

But this difficulty in the way of flight through the ether was but slight as against the other defect that their systems had in common with all terrene bodies. They could develop heat easily enough; but how were they to keep intact and consistent in a vacuum constitutions which had been developed under the pressure of an atmosphere? How would the tissues and the organs of their bodies adjust themselves to the absence of atmospheric conditions? As they rose above the clouds, they had long felt as if their limbs and even the molecules of their bodies were without due subordination and apt to assume individual independence, even when the spirit grew boldest and most concentrated in its energy. Their own wings and faleenas that were intended for upper and rarer altitudes had to be made tougher and more elastic than for common flight close to the earth. They had to make them at last in a vacuum, and subject them to all the conditions that met them in the ether. But it would take myriads of generations, if not of geological ages, to bring their own bodies into such a state as to bear vacuum around them for years; and then in their terrene life with such a new constitution they would be unable to endure so great a pressure as that of the atmosphere near the earth. The only contrivance that seemed feasible was a farfaleena enclosing the traveller round, large enough to hold alfarene supplies for the long voyage, and strong enough to stand the pressure of an atmosphere within it. This they might manage after some years of experimentation.

But enclosure within such a narrow space for so long a period, without the possibility of free movement into the ether, did not attract them; and any little accident in their machinery or to their supplies might make their faleena their tomb. Some other line must be taken by investigation and invention, if stellar migration was to become a possible and desirable thing.

This line was indicated by discoveries of the Sidralmo or bio-chemical families, and the Ooaromo or psycho-physiological families. The Sidralmo had long been investigating the ultimate constituents of living matter; and again and again, when seeming to be on their track, they were baffled by the escape of some element, and left with only the _caput mortuum_ to analyse. Under their clirolans too, powerful though they were, the principle of life showed itself in many ways to their senses, and yet evaded all attempt to isolate it. The lavolan, which showed the inner structure of living bodies as they lived and moved, brought them nearest of all to the veil that hung over the secret of vitality. Plants and stationary animal organisms allowed them full scope for their investigations. In them they could see the life ebb and flow, as death approached or receded; in them they could find every material element entering into their composition, and test with their varied and minute meteorological apparatus all the forms of energy which moved them; they checked the current of life, and watched in the plant or animal the elements and energies that remained comparatively stable and those that deteriorated; they let it die out, and watched the throb and struggle of the various constituents and forces as they collapsed; then, when it seemed to have surrendered all life or hope of life, they brought it back, by their knowledge of its existence, to the upward struggle again and no feature of the return escaped their notice; most watchful of all were they on that dim borderland between life and death, where dawn is sunset and sunset dawn. In every stage were they able to isolate each strand of the thread of life; yet the essential secret of all escaped them. Once the organism had shrivelled into a bundle of dead fibres or fallen to dust, no effort of theirs could give it the throb of life again. They could reproduce every element and tissue and fibre, and under their clirolans place them together in the forms of life with marvellous art. One thing was still wanting to make it all it had been. They could even mimic the flow of life through it by means of their command over the sources of energy; but the result was only mechanical; they had not supplied it with the never-failing spring of vitality.

At last, during the period of this great illumination there was thrown a beam of light on the right path for solving this problem. One of the Sidralmo was experimenting on certain substances to see how they behaved under the rays issuing from a lavolan or revealer of inner mechanism. They were chiefly new vegetable substances the properties of which it was his duty to discover and tabulate. He was also mingling one or two new minerals with the plant-products in order to see what modification the blending would cause. One metal had lately been found issuing from the deepest of their lava-wells in the form of vapour; when cooled, it had assumed a crystalline character, and acted to some extent like a magnet; yet it was sensitive to energies that an ordinary magnet ignored, as, for instance, the passage of exceptional nerve-force through the human body. Lightly hung, it quivered when near anyone who happened to be greatly excited. But it paid no heed to the normal currents of energy along the nerves. There was also a species of plant recently evolved that had shown itself singularly sensitive on the approach of any living thing; it shrank not merely from the touch of a hand or of any animal, but from the proximity of life, whilst it remained unmoved when touched by any falling leaf or stone. The experimenter had taken a number of these plants and made of them a basketwork, in which he hung a piece of the new magnetic metal by a slender thread. This he placed above his lavolan to see how the rays from it would affect, or be affected by, the new combination of influences. There seemed to be little or no effect, but he continued his experiment to make sure. Through some imperfection in its walls his vacuum failed; he tried to pump the air out again, but, this failing too, he substituted an alfarene-vacuum which happened to be near him. The result was most striking. The metal, lightly hung in the basket, became agitated at once, and its movements grew more or less active as it approached or was drawn off from the vacuum. After a time it began to show less sensitiveness, and at last became almost quiescent, even though the vacuum remained efficient. On examining the alfarene plant under a magnifier, he found a minute slug, that had evidently escaped the notice of the maker of the vacuum; this had been the source of the agitation of the metal in the basket during its last spasmodic efforts to hold on to life; and, when death, through the lack of air, had overcome it, the agitation had ceased. The plant itself had by the presence of its life kept the test from becoming completely quiescent. The influence of the life of the experimenter himself seemed to be largely neutralised by the surrounding air; it was only when he came very close to the test that it indicated his presence.

Here was revealed to the Sidralmo the path they had to follow; a wide vista into the darkness had been suddenly opened. It was not long before they had taken full advantage of the discovery. They invented the most helpful of all their instruments, the sidralan or biometer; they hung the combination of life-sensitive plant and nerve-sensitive metal itself in a vacuum, directly in the path of an electric current; the details of its mechanism they rapidly improved till it measured with accuracy the degree of vitality in any plant or animal. But they soon found that it was differently affected by vegetable and animal life. The energy of the former moved it but slightly, and only in certain directions; the latter seemed to surround it and agitate it from all sides; it quivered as if with subdued excitement. Yet there were degrees in both; some plants moved it more than the most primitive unicellular animals, although the movement was less pervasive. Thus were they well on the way towards the isolation of the life-principle from its constant concomitants.

The biometer came to be of as much importance to the medical superintendents as to the Sidralmo; it abridged the labour of their weekly inspection; for it told in a moment whether the vitality in any member of the community had fallen or risen in degree, whether it was below the proper average, in short whether all his organs and tissues would have to be minutely examined for the cause, and whether his dietary scheme would have to be revised. The psycho-physiological families found it of some use in their investigations into the faculties of man and their basis in his bodily constitution. They found that the wiser and more intellectual a personality was, the more gently he moved the sidralan; the more of animal vitality he had, the more violently he agitated it by his presence.

But the instrument was too rough and undiscriminating for their purposes. It could not distinguish between the purely spiritual and the purely animal except in this loose way. They tried modifications of it, but without success. It was the Ailomo or astrobiological families that helped them to take the right direction. They were constantly bringing down out of the stratum above the atmosphere vessels full of the seeming nothingness that existed there, in order to investigate it and see whether it was mere vacuum or not; and though the contents appealed to none of their senses but the electric, their various instruments of research revealed different energies and a large amount of life, besides minute forms of matter without life. On several occasions they had noticed that the contents affected their tests differently when the experimenter was near and when he stood at a distance. Step by step they separated the element that acted thus from its various concomitants. And soon they were able to concentrate a considerable quantity of it in a receiver exhausted of air, and to precipitate it in powdery metallic form.

The substance was handed over to the Ooaromo, who saw that it would supply the test they wanted; for it was but slightly sensitive to the presence of animals, and its sensitiveness gradually vanished as they tried it with lower and lower species of animals; whilst it quivered near men, less near young men and women, only slightly near infants, but with quick tremors when near the older and wiser Umanorans, who had suffered and thought through long centuries. They came to the conclusion that this residuum was the essence of some element in the ether that responded to the energy of the higher faculties, as the magnet responded to electricity. They had in fact found at last a true test of soul, that refinement of the higher animal energies which has assumed a new grade in life, the consciousness of itself, and the power of keeping its own form and essence as an entity for ever separate from all other beings and things.

It was not long before the Ooaromo had made from it an apparatus which would test the presence of soul and measure its force. In this ooaran or psychometer they were at last furnished with an instrument that would give organic unity and new purpose to their science. They would now be able to watch and measure the growth of soul in the child, and the ebb and flow of its strength in youth; and thus would they give new vigour and life to the creative function of their science. They had now an exact basis for education; as guides of parents and proparents in tuition they would walk in the full day, where before they had groped in dim twilight; in every case would they be able to advise with the same certainty as the medical elders advised on the health of the body. For the mature men and women would they act as true father-confessors, and do what the priests of so many religions pretended to do, but did not do; they would be able to tell everyone, who desired it, whether his soul had advanced or receded in power after any series of sufferings and deeds, or any line of conduct, and thus to give advice as to what should be done or omitted in the future. And when the elders had come near what had before seemed the utmost limit of life, they would be able to tell them whether their nausea of existence was only fleeting and subjective, or whether the roots of their soul were loosening themselves from the soil of the body.