MAROS PLACES ANDERTON IN COMMUNICATION WITH HIS MOTHER, AND DISSIPATES HIS SUPERSTITIOUS IDEAS AND OTHERWISE ENLIGHTENS HIM AS TO THE POSSIBILITIES OF SCIENCE.

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III.

A DAY WITH MAROS.

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I called on Maros, the Curator of Scientific Research and Application, as per appointment, and found him surrounded with everything calculated to contribute to the enjoyments of earthly existence. His residence differed in many respects from that of Xamas. All its appointments and environments were in the most exquisite taste. But this may be said, once for all, of every private residence and public edifice in Intermere. The taste of architects and occupants differed, but all were on lines of beauty, comfort and convenience.

There is no luxury in Intermere, as we use the term. Luxury is a merely comparative term in the rest of the world, distinguishing those who have much from those who have little or nothing. Here every rational taste is gratified in all particulars. The people have clearly discovered the hidden springs of Nature's kindly intentions toward man, and utilize them at individual and collective will.

"You are prompt," said Maros, seating me in his study. "Let us proceed with the matter in which you are interested."

He placed before me a perfectly drawn map of a section of the United States, embracing the place of my nativity, and asked me to point out the exact vicinity of my mother's home. I found it readily.

"The point you now occupy is the lineal opposite. Turn to the point, or direction, you have designated, and direct your concentrated thought there. If a responsive impression comes to you, communicate its purport to me."

I sat in silent thought a few moments, Maros closely regarding me.

"I am impressed that my mother is prostrated with grief; that she has just learned of the death of my kinsman; that rumors of the loss of the Mistletoe have reached her, being first cabled from Singapore to New York, and from thence transmitted to the press, and that she is impressed with the belief that I, too, am dead. I fear that she will not survive the double shock."

"Frame such a thought as you would wish impressed upon your mother's consciousness and faith, and tell me what follows."

This is the thought I framed: "Mother, I am alive and well in an unknown land, surrounded by kind friends, and will ere long return to you."

Later to Maros: "I am convinced. My mother has partially recovered from the shock. My death would have been the fatal blow. She smiles with pious resignation, through the tempest of her grief, and extends her arms as if to embrace me. This, however, is wholly an impression; I do not see or hear her, but we seem to stand face to face, and both realize it."

"Give yourself no further concern, nor seek further communication with her until you meet her in person. She knows you are alive and will return to her. Nothing she will hear will change that belief."

"Tell me by what divine or celestial power I am thus enabled to project my thoughts across unknown seas and continents, and receive responsive thoughts. Only supernatural agencies could accomplish this."

"You have what you call the telephone?"

"Yes."

"You communicate alike with friends and strangers hundreds of miles distant in an ordinary tone of voice?"

"Yes."

"Is that supernatural?"

"No; it is the result of scientific achievement and natural phenomena."

"Would one, coming out of the depths of absolute ignorance of scientific achievement, as you call it, regard it as a supernatural agency?"

"He undoubtedly would."

"What would you think of his conclusion?"

"That it was the result of superstition."

"And yet you who have just stepped out of the dawn into the full day; you who have transmitted uttered thoughts to remote distances through a coarse steel or copper wire and received other uttered thoughts in return, regard with superstitious awe, as supernatural, what you have just experienced. Wherein do you differ from the untutored barbarian?"

I sat in silence.

"The telephone wire is to the thread of sentient thought which may span the universe itself, what the horseback mail-rider is to your modern methods of communication—what the earliest dawn is to the full day."

Maros explained at full length how he became possessed of the knowledge of my identity, family connections and my misfortunes, summing up:

"When you were found in the remote and outer ocean and brought within the precincts of Intermere, you were physically unconscious, but still possessing partially dormant mental faculties; that is, you continued to think feebly and intermittently. We traced your two intermittent lines of thought to your mother in America, and to, or rather toward, your kinsman at some unknown point. Tracing again to your parent we learned that Marshall had accompanied the American expedition to China from Manila. Following this clew, we ascertained that he had been killed, and that that fact would reach his home in due course, as well as the fact that information of the loss of your ship would reach America almost simultaneously. What your mother now regards as premonitions of impending evil or misfortunes were communications with her consciousness, far more refined and perfect than the subsequent cable communications, but quite as natural, and in no sense supernatural."

"This is indeed amazing!" I exclaimed.

He further said that this was an individual case and purely the result of my condition. "We do not seek, as a rule, knowledge of individualities in the outside world, but confine our inquiries to matters of general moment. We know of the steps of progress, retrogression, of savagery and butchery and wrong and oppression which dominate an embryotic civilization. Amuse yourself for a time with the pictures and tapestries, and I will give you a record of the outer world's important matters of yesterday."

He opened a cabinet, and assumed the mien of expectant inquiry and meditation. Soon his hands began to move with rhythmic rapidity over the curiously inlaid center of the flat surface of the open cabinet. At the end of ten or fifteen minutes his manipulations ceased, a compartment above noiselessly opened, and eight beautifully printed pages, four by six inches, bound in the form of a booklet, fell upon the table.

It was printed in characters more graceful than our own Roman letters, from which they might have been evolved, or the Roman Alphabet might have deteriorated from what appeared before me. The English language was not used, and yet I could readily read and comprehend the lines. The pages before me comprised a compendium of yesterday's doings of the entire world, and included a note of my own case.

They told of all the military operations in China, in the Philippines, in South Africa, in the far East and in the remote West; of labor troubles in the mining districts of America; the strike of the textile operatives on our Atlantic border; the unrest of the Finns and Slavs; of plots and counterplots, and political assassination and revolution, attempted or accomplished, and the full catalogue of such happenings, with now and then a flash of loftier civilization.

"What you read is being reproduced in every divisional municipality of the Commonwealth, with such a number of instantaneous duplications as may be required for the perusal and study of all who desire to compare tinseled and ornamented barbarism with true civilization.

"Selfishness, oppression, slaughter, pride, conquest, greed, vanity, self-adulation and base passions make up ninety-nine one-hundredths of this record. What a commentary on such humanity! To it love, brotherhood and mutual helpfulness are too trivial for serious consideration.

"The nations and their rulers, differing somewhat as to degree, stand for organized and dominant wrong, based primarily on selfishness—the exact reverse of the conditions that should exist."

"This," said I, still contemplating the pages, "compares with our newspapers."

"As two objects may compare with each other as to bulk or form, but in no other respect. This is to promote wisdom. The newspaper to feed vicious or depraved appetite, as well as to convey useful information. This is the cold, colorless, passionless record of facts and information, from which knowledge and wisdom may be deduced to some extent. Your newspaper is the opposite, taken in its entirety. It consists of the inextricable mingling together of the good and the bad, of the useful and the useless, and the elevating and the degrading, the latter always in the ascendant.

"It foments discord instead of promoting profitable discussion, which is the bridle-path leading into the highway of wisdom. It is built upon the cornerstone of selfishness, the other name of commercialism, and is thoroughly imbued with the spirit of greed.

"It caters to the public demand regardless of the spirit or the depravity behind it. 'Quatro! Quatro! Quatro!' is the burden of its cry, and for quatro it is willing to lead the world forward or backward, as the case may be. It has been growing in stature and retrograding in usefulness for fifty years throughout the world, in all save increasing facilities, and avidity for pandering to the worst and most uncivilized propensities of mankind, and it will probably continue to grow worse for a century to come.

"Fifty years ago it was blindly controversial, but there was enough of reason in its discussions to give hope for the future. Now it is a mere mental and moral refuse car, and its so-called religious form is devoted only to a more refined class of refuse, if that expression is allowable.

"As a whole, it represents classes and not the whole community; prejudices, and not principles; it advocates selfish, not general interests; it panders to petty jealousies; it indulges in tittle-tattle in mere wantonness, and has no aim save the grossly materialistic."

I winced under his fierce arraignment and invective, for I am a newspaper man myself.

"I know that I have touched you in a sensitive spot, but I speak of the newspaper in a general sense. There are worthy exceptions, despite all the untoward environments; but, unfortunately, their influence is limited. Your masses read and re-read accounts of how two beings beat each other out of human semblance on a wager, and pass, unread and unnoticed, the best thoughts of your greatest scientists and profoundest thinkers. It is not the canaille who do this alone, but your statesmen and rulers, men of large affairs and men of the learned professions."

I turned the conversation, saying:

"It is incomprehensible to me how you produced this record of events in so short a time and without apparent mechanical or physical effort."

"Doubtless, but not more incomprehensible to you than your linotype machines and perfecting press would have been to Gutenberg. And your discoveries and inventions would be no more incomprehensible to him than would his types and crude multiplying press be to the papyrus writers, scriveners and hieroglyphants of the earlier world.

"The transition from the work of the papyrians to the achievements of the Intermereans is the result of that evolution known as scientific research into Nature's beneficence, in which mechanical invention is a mere incident, and its application to a high, unselfish and noble purpose, instead of selfish, base and ignoble ends.

"We had outstripped your present ideals ages before the Chinese began block printing, or Gutenberg fashioned his types and press. Both these, as well as your own advanced mechanism, as well as your every other great achievement in science and research, were the result of the thought-seed sown or diffused from this land, but which fell on absolutely barren soil, or only grew in puny or defective forms, far short of ripening or maturity.

"Your Franklin comprehended the supreme and all-pervading power and genius of the Universe, the knowledge of and the power to utilize which makes man godlike, but the dense ignorance and gross materialism of his day prevented him from enlightening his people.

"Your Morse conceived and executed the scheme of telegraphic signals cycles after we had discarded it.

"Your nameless and unknown discoverers, whose weak but apprehending genius was utilized by Bell, gave you the telephone ages after it had been supplanted here by our more nearly perfect system of intelligent communication with the entire terrestrial world, and we are now exploring, with it, the adjacent systems of the Universe with promising results.

"Your Edison and other electrical discoverers are more than a cycle behind us, and have as yet but touched the outer surface of the great secret. To them and to others the current of the Universe is a constant menace and a danger. To us it as gentle and as harmless as the flowers that bloom by the wayside, and responds to our every wish and use with absolute tractability.

"The fault of the rest of the world is that all great discoveries, all the unlockings of Nature's treasure-house, are turned to selfish ends, to the aggrandizement of the few, and the detriment, if not the oppression, of the many; hence civil commotions, wars, tyrannies, the insolence of opulence, and the failure to carry forward the process of civilization and the elevation of the race by the unselfish application of attained wisdom. The barbarian spirit of Self is dominant.

"You were about to ask if you might carry this record home. No. You will be permitted to inspect it and others similar during your sojourn, and carry their remembrance with you, and thus be enabled to compare them with your own current records of contemporaneous dates; but that is all.

"The Western nations have opened their own gates and invited eventual destruction by this apparently temporary invasion of the East. This war, if it may be so called, will be of short duration, followed by the oppression inseparable from selfish greed, commercialism and the love of conquest and arbitrary power which compels the unwilling obedience of peoples.

"But the 400,000,000 Chinese and affiliated races, are more insidiously dangerous than you know. They will cultivate the seed now being sown, and prepare the dragon's harvest of blood. In the remoter provinces they will soon breed soldiers and captains, who will eclipse the bloody and destructive achievements of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, profiting by your present superior knowledge of mechanism and the arts of war, which they will appropriate and assimilate, and turn to terrible final account.

"The commercial greed of the West will be the enemy of the Western peoples themselves. It will fit and arm the aroused avengers for their world-wide invasion and conflict. Selfish capitalists will do this in spite of all inhibitions, under the plea of creating prosperous conditions and extending commerce, and their people and their posterity will perish by the enginery which selfish commercial greed placed in the hands of their enemies."

Maros presented me to another official, and politely dismissed me to visit the places of interest in the city. Upon my return to America I compared the contemporaneous history of the world with the daily records I had been permitted to inspect, the remembrance of which I vividly retained, and found every fact therein to be absolutely correct.

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