The Coming of the Ice Read online

horrified. I shookher with a superhuman strength.

  "Tell me!" I shouted, "Tell me--Or I'll--!" She told me--what else couldshe do.

  "They were killed in an accident," she gasped, "in a taxi--acollision--the Strand--!" And at that moment a crowd of nurses andattendants arrived, called by the other frantic woman, and they put meto bed again.

  I have no memory of the next few days. I was in delirium, and I wasnever told what I said during my ravings. Nor can I express the feelingsI was saturated with when at last I regained my mind again. Between myold emotions and any attempt to put them into words, or even to rememberthem, lies always that insurmountable wall of my Change. I cannotunderstand what I must have felt, I cannot express it.

  I only know that for weeks I was sunk in a misery beyond any misery Ihad ever imagined before. The only two friends I had on earth were goneto me. I was left alone. And, for the first time, I began to see beforeme all these endless years that would be the same, dull, lonely.

  Yet I recovered. I could feel each day the growth of a strange new vigorin my limbs, a vast force that was something tangibly expressive toeternal life. Slowly my anguish began to die. After a week more, I beganto understand how my emotions were leaving me, how love and beauty andeverything of which poetry was made--how all this was going. I could notbear the thought at first. I would look at the golden sunlight and theblue shadow of the wind, and I would say,

  "God! How beautiful!" And the words would echo meaninglessly in my ears.Or I would remember Alice's face, that face I had once loved soinextinguishably, and I would weep and clutch my forehead, and clench myfists, crying,

  "O God, how can I live without her!" Yet there would be a little strangefancy in my head at the same moment, saying,

  "Who is this Alice? You know no such person." And truly I would wonderwhether she had ever existed.

  So, slowly, the old emotions were shed away from me, and I began to joyin a corresponding growth of my mental perceptions. I began to toy idlywith mathematical formulae I had forgotten years ago, in the samefashion that a poet toys with a word and its shades of meaning. I wouldlook at everything with new, seeing eyes, new perception, and I wouldunderstand things I had never understood before, because formerly myemotions had always occupied me more than my thoughts.

  And so the weeks went by, until, one day, I was well.

  ... What, after all, is the use of this chronicle? Surely there willnever be men to read it. I have heard them say that the snow will nevergo. I will be buried, it will be buried with me; and it will be the endof us both. Yet, somehow, it eases my weary soul a little to write....

  Need I say that I lived, thereafter, many thousands of thousands ofyears, until this day? I cannot detail that life. It is a long round ofnew, fantastic impressions, coming dream-like, one after another,melting into each other. In looking back, as in looking back upondreams, I seem to recall only a few isolated periods clearly; and itseems that my imagination must have filled in the swift movement betweenepisodes. I think now, of necessity, in terms of centuries andmillenniums, rather than days and months.... The snow blows terriblyabout my little fire, and I know it will soon gather courage to quenchus both ...

  * * * * *

  Years passed, at first with a sort of clear wonder. I watched thingsthat took place everywhere in the world. I studied. The other studentswere much amazed to see me, a man of thirty odd, coming back to college.

  "But Judas, Dennell, you've already got your Ph.D! What more do youwant?" So they would all ask me. And I would reply;

  "I want an M.D. and an F.R.C.S." I didn't tell them that I wanteddegrees in Law, too, and in Biology and Chemistry, in Architecture andEngineering, in Psychology and Philosophy. Even so, I believe theythought me mad. But poor fools! I would think. They can hardly realizethat I have all of eternity before me to study.

  I went to school for many decades. I would pass from University toUniversity, leisurely gathering all the fruits of every subject I tookup, revelling in study as no student revelled ever before. There was noneed of hurry in my life, no fear of death too soon. There was amagnificence of vigor in my body, and a magnificence of vision andclarity in my brain. I felt myself a super-man. I had only to go onstoring up wisdom until the day should come when all knowledge of theworld was mine, and then I could command the world. I had no need forhurry. O vast life! How I gloried in my eternity! And how little good ithas ever done me, by the irony of God.

  For several centuries, changing my name and passing from place to place,I continued my studies. I had no consciousness of monotony, for, to theintellect, monotony cannot exist: it was one of those emotions I hadleft behind. One day, however, in the year 2132, a great discovery wasmade by a man called Zarentzov. It had to do with the curvature ofspace, quite changing the conceptions that we had all followed sinceEinstein. I had long ago mastered the last detail of Einstein's theory,as had, in time, the rest of the world. I threw myself immediately intothe study of this new, epoch-making conception.

  To my amazement, it all seemed to me curiously dim and elusive. I couldnot quite grasp what Zarentzov was trying to formulate.

  "Why," I cried, "the thing is a monstrous fraud!" I went to theprofessor of Physics in the University I then attended, and I told himit was a fraud, a huge book of mere nonsense. He looked at me ratherpityingly.

  "I am afraid, Modevski," he said, addressing me by the name I was at thetime using, "I am afraid you do not understand it, that is all. Whenyour mind has broadened, you will. You should apply yourself morecarefully to your Physics." But that angered me, for I had mastered myPhysics before he was ever born. I challenged him to explain the theory.And he did! He put it, obviously, in the clearest language he could. YetI understood nothing. I stared at him dumbly, until he shook his headimpatiently, saying that it was useless, that if I could not grasp it Iwould simply have to keep on studying. I was stunned. I wandered away ina daze.

  For do you see what happened? During all those years I had studiedceaselessly, and my mind had been clear and quick as the day I first hadleft the hospital. But all that time I had been able only to remain whatI was--an extraordinarily intelligent man of the twentieth century. Andthe rest of the race had been progressing! It had been swiftly gatheringknowledge and power and ability all that time, faster and faster, whileI had been only remaining still. And now here was Zarentzov and theteachers of the Universities, and, probably, a hundred intelligent men,who had all outstripped me! I was being left behind.

  And that is what happened. I need not dilate further upon it. By the endof that century I had been left behind by all the students of the world,and I never did understand Zarentzov. Other men came with othertheories, and these theories were accepted by the world. But I could notunderstand them. My intellectual life was at an end. I had nothing moreto understand. I knew everything I was capable of knowing, and,thenceforth, I could only play wearily with the old ideas.

  * * * * *

  Many things happened in the world. A time came when the East and West,two mighty unified hemispheres, rose up in arms: the civil war of aplanet. I recall only chaotic visions of fire and thunder and hell. Itwas all incomprehensible to me: like a bizarre dream, things happened,people rushed about, but I never knew what they were doing. I lurkedduring all that time in a tiny shuddering hole under the city ofYokohama, and by a miracle I survived. And the East won. But it seems tohave mattered little who did win, for all the world had become, in allexcept its few remaining prejudices, a single race, and nothing waschanged when it was all rebuilt again, under a single government.

  I saw the first of the strange creatures who appeared among us in theyear 6371, men who were later known to be from the planet Venus. Butthey were repulsed, for they were savages compared with the Earthmen,although they were about equal to the people of my own century, 1900.Those of them who did not perish of the cold after the intense warmth oftheir world, and those who were not killed by our hands, those fewreturned
silently home again. And I have always regretted that I had notthe courage to go with them.

  I watched a time when the world reached perfection in mechanics, whenmen could accomplish anything with a touch of the finger. Strange men,these creatures of the hundredth century, men with huge brains and tinyshriveled bodies, atrophied limbs, and slow, ponderous movements ontheir little conveyances. It was I, with my ancient compunctions, whoshuddered when at last they put to death all the perverts, thecriminals, and the insane, ridding the world of the scum for which theyhad no more need. It was then that I was forced to produce my tatteredold papers, proving my identity and my story. They knew it was true, insome strange fashion of theirs, and, thereafter, I was kept onexhibition as an archaic survival.

  I saw the world made immortal through the new invention of a man calledKathol, who used somewhat the same method "legend" decreed had been usedupon me. I