A STORY WITHOUT AN END
ON a fine day during the Cambrian Era bright sunshine flooded the best that our old Earth could do in the way of scenery at that remote period. Huge mud-flats extended for thousands of miles on every hand, and between them stretched shallow oceans. Humble forms of vegetation flourished in the mud and a heavy atmosphere, dense as steam, covered all. The air was full of noble rainbows, probably the most beautiful phenomena known to Cambrian times.
Absolute silence marked the scene. No feather made music in the air; no fin rippled the water; no beast or herd of beasts moved upon the face of the earth to break the terrific monotony of that prehistoric picture.
Suddenly upon a steaming mud-flat there appeared a little lobster-like creature ofmany joints, large eyes, and various feelers arranged like whiskers around his jaws. He was twenty inches in length and carried himself with conscious dignity, albeit mud knocks the dignity out of almost anything but a trilobite. But this trilobite, for such he was, surveyed that Cambrian noon pensively, curled his whiskers with thought, and wriggled his shining joints in the sun. Presently a hen trilobite appeared and squatted beside him placidly.
“When I survey this spectacle,” said the trilobite, “when I reflect that the world is empty but for us, I am often tempted to wonder.”
He rolled his goggle eyes towards the zenith.
“Wonder? What at?” asked his lady. “Surely, as the lord of creation, you have a right to everything here? You’re the most wonderful thing in the mud, after all; you can walk about and talk; in fact, you’re alive—a live creature—Nature’s masterpiece.”
“It would be easy and pleasant to think so,” mused the trilobite, “but sometimes, in rare fits of modesty, I almost fancy that I am not the best that Nature can do. I even picture something bigger, better, more beautiful than a trilobite. It may be morbid, but I do.”
“This is nonsense and stuff, my dear. You’re fishing for compliments? Bigger? Good heavens! you’re twenty inches long; isn’t that big enough for anybody? Better? Well, you’re a good husband and father; what better could any trilobite be? And as to beauty, I shouldn’t have married you if you had not been about the handsomest gentleman trilobite that ever sat and curled his whiskers. Nature never made anything better than a trilobite. Why? Because she can’t. Can you picture anything different? Can you imagine any creature with more convenient limbs, more exquisite joints, more perfect claws, better eyesight, better senses, better manners, or more self-respecting? You know you can’t.”
“I actually cannot picture the creature, but I can picture the possibility of such a creature.”
“Twaddle!” said Mrs. Trilobite. “We’re the best and last, so there’s an end of it. The world was made for us.” She had the final word, very properly, and the trilobite shrugged his shoulders and waddled off to his family. Still he doubted.
Some millions of millions of years having passed by, we find ourselves, upon a bright afternoon of Mesozoic times, in the company of that genial and gigantic Deinosaur, Brontosaurus Excelsus. The monster, despite pleasant climatic conditions, was ill at ease. He sat upon his haunches, swayed his enormous neck to the right and left, and listlessly chewed off the heads of six lofty palm-trees.
There was a crash—a boiling, seething explosion as of a torpedo in the river at his feet—and forth came the Deinosaur’s bride, an enormous being, much like himself, though somewhat smaller.
“Ah, my little dear, back again?” he exclaimed, and, smashing off the palm-trees like cabbage-stumps, sank down beside her.
“You are unhappy, my own Bronto,” she said, with the pretty solicitude of a young wife.
“Not unhappy, merely thoughtful, my love. This good world—the lakes and rivers, the trees and groves of club mosses—all; I sometimes think it can hardly have been created for us.”
“Not for us!”
“Not for us and our friends alone. Perhaps some day something greater, wiser, better even than Brontosaurus Excelsus may browse here, and swim these rivers, and lift its head to the sun.”
“This is mere moonshine, my dearest. Greater than you! Is it possible to be greater than a hundred feet long? Is it possible to be heavier than fifty tons? And, for the rest, who should know your goodness and wisdom better than I? No, no; you let your humility run away with you, my sweet. You are the first and best—Nature’s masterpiece, her joy, her unutterable delight.”
“There’s Atlantosaurus,” said Bronto dubiously.
His wife frowned, and her huge lizard eyes were clouded.
“There is Atlantosaurus,” she admitted, “the hulking, bloodthirsty, ignoble wretch! A thing that eats other live creatures—a debased, degraded, distant relation—a cannibal! Nature blushes when she thinks of him and his kind; but we, we are upon a plane apart; we eat the green grass, the juicy cane, the young fronds and ripe fruit of the palms; we——”
A shadow hid the sun. High above the trees rose a dreadful head with eyes like bicycle-wheels and teeth that glittered and dropped blood.
“It’s Atlanto—this is no place for us!”
Two simultaneous splashes cast a huge column of water upward as Brontosaurus and his better half vanished beneath that Mesozoic river.
Again some odd millions upon millions of years have swept by in the eternal procession of Time, and we find Professor Jebbway,F.R.S., etc., etc., sitting disconsolate at his desk, with a review of his last monumental work in his hands.
The reviewer was absolutely uninformed concerning Professor Jebbway’s recondite subject; he had therefore been wise enough simply to gush and gloat through four columns of his journal, and declare that no such achievement of the human brain could be recorded since the stupendous life-work of Darwin.
Mrs. Jebbway brought in a cup of tea and rated the Professor.
“I’m sure that’s nothing to be so precious glum about,” she said. “The man’s all butter, from start to finish. If his blessed paper mattered, it might do you some good. I read it yesterday.”
“It isn’t that. From this gentleman, praise or blame are equally unimportant. I’m a little overburdened with my own limitations to-day. I wish I’d come later, when the world knew more.”
“It never will know more. It knows too much already, thanks to men like you—that is if I read the Scriptures aright.”
“No—we’re only at the outset. A man’s such an unfinished, incomplete, futile, short-lived machine. Just the dawning of a few senses done up in a poor, puny envelope.”
“We’re nothing of the sort, and if you’d only let all this nonsense out of your head and take more exercise, and study the Bible now and again for a change from Huxley and all the rest of them——”
“A puny envelope, holding nothing of worth. If a million million years were past, and I had come then——”
“If I didn’t know you,” she said, “I might be cross. Surely your wife counts? At all events man is the greatest of created things—the first thing Nature ever made that knew it was alive—her masterpiece. And nothing greater than man will ever tread this planet. Mark my words, and read the Bible. Now drink your tea, and don’t talk nonsense about puny envelopes. You’re a well-nourished, good-looking and learned man, with a thousand a year. And if Nature ever made anybody better and wiser and more sensible—as a rule—I should like to see him.”
Professor Jebbway sighed and took his tea.
“Something better is hid in Time,” he said: “nothing better than you, my dear partner, that is impossible; but something better far, wiser far than your humble servant.”
Another round string of million years and we reach the Latest Thing.
The Latest Thing reclined in its dwelling-house of glass, and by sheer mental effortcommunicated with other things afar off and exchanged ideas with them—as we to-day by wireless telegraphy. The Latest Thing was pliable and pink, with a head like an overgrown vegetable-marrow. His brain towered up into a cranial cavity lifted three feet above his face. His eyes twinkled like diamonds. He breathed through gills, and had a mouth merely rudimentary, for he lived by smell. Upon his back were wings of gauze; and when he moved, these became invisible, and he floated gently through the air.
The Latest Thing’s wife wafted herself in from somewhere, and they communicated by their brains and eyes.
“Oh, if Nature would only get on a little,” said the Latest Thing. “I am impatient and she is so slow. Not one of our children appear to give the least sign or evidence of advance and improvement.”
“I should hope not, indeed!” telegraphed back his wife. “The females are exactly like me, and the males are exactly like you—bless the little ducks! ‘Improvement!’ They are the most perfect young things you’ll find, seek where you may.”
“Yet I hoped that they——”
“Your old craze. I tell you we are thehigh-water mark, the crest of the wave, the ultimate best, the triumph of Creation—Perfection!”
But the Latest Thing shook his huge head. “I doubt it,” he flashed back to her.