Book the Third - A Neophyte in Utopia - 1. The Peaceful Hills Beside the River

by H.G. Wells

　　Section 1

　　"God has made more universes than there are pages in all thelibraries of earth; man may learn and grow for ever amidst themultitude of His worlds."

　　Mr. Barnstaple had a sense of floating from star to star andfrom plane to plane, through an incessant variety and wonder ofexistences. He passed over the edge of being; he drifted for agesdown the faces of immeasurable cliffs; he travelled from everlastingto everlasting in a stream of innumerable little stars. At last camea phase of profound restfulness. There was a sky of level clouds,warmed by the light of a declining sun, and a skyline of gentlyundulating hills, golden grassy upon their crests and carrying darkpurple woods and thickets and patches of pale yellow like ripeningcorn upon their billowing slopes. Here and there were domedbuildings and terraces, flowering gardens and little villas andgreat tanks of gleaming water.

　　There were many trees like the eucalyptus--only that they had darkerleaves--upon the slopes immediately below and round and about him;and all the land fell at last towards a very broad valley down whicha shining river wound leisurely in great semicircular bends until itbecame invisible in evening haze.

　　A slight movement turned his eyes to discover Lychnis seated besidehim. She smiled at him and put her finger on her lips. He had avague desire to address her, and smiled faintly and moved his head.She got up and slipped away from him past the head of his couch.He was too feeble and incurious to raise his head and look to seewhere she had gone. But he saw that she had been sitting at a whitetable on which was a silver bowl full of intensely blue flowers,and the colour of the flowers held him and diverted his first faintimpulse of curiosity.

　　He wondered whether colours were really brighter in this Utopianworld or whether something in the air quickened and clarified hisapprehension.

　　Beyond the table were the white pillars of the loggia. A branch ofone of these eucalyptus-like trees, with leaves bronze black, camevery close outside.

　　And there was music. It was a little trickle of sound, that drippedand ran, a mere unobtrusive rivulet of little clear notes upon themargin of his consciousness, the song of some fairyland Debussy.

　　Peace....

　　Section 2

　　He was awake again.

　　He tried hard to remember.

　　He had been knocked over and stunned in some manner too big andviolent for his mind to hold as yet.

　　Then people had stood about him and talked about him. He rememberedtheir feet. He must have been lying on his face with his face veryclose to the ground. Then they had turned him over, and the light ofthe rising sun had been blinding in his eyes.

　　Two gentle goddesses had given him some restorative in a gorge atthe foot of high cliffs. He had been carried in a woman's arms asa child is carried. After that there were cloudy and dissolvingmemories of a long journey, a long flight through the air. Therewas something next to this, a vision of huge complicated machinerythat did not join on to anything else. For a time his mind held thisup in an interrogative fashion and then dropped it wearily. Therehad been voices in consultation, the prick of an injection and somegas that he had had to inhale. And sleep--or sleeps, spells of sleepinterspersed with dreams....

　　Now with regard to that gorge; how had he got there?

　　The gorge--in another light, a greenish light--with Utopians whostruggled with a great cable.

　　Suddenly hard and clear came the vision of the headland ofQuarantine Crag towering up against the bright blue morning sky, andthen the crest of it grinding round, with its fluttering flags andits dishevelled figures, passing slowly and steadily, as some greatship passes out of a dock, with its flags and passengers into theinvisible and unknown. All the wonder of his great adventurereturned to Mr. Barnstaple's mind.

　　Section 3

　　He sat up in a state of interrogation and Lychnis reappeared at hiselbow.

　　She seated herself on his bed close to him, shook up some pillowsbehind him and persuaded him to lie back upon them. She conveyed tohim that he was cured of some illness and no longer infectious, butthat he was still very weak. Of what illness? he asked himself. Moreof the immediate past became clear to him.

　　"There was an epidemic," he said. "A sort of mixed epidemic--of allour infections."

　　She smiled reassuringly. It was over. The science and organizationof Utopia had taken the danger by the throat and banished it.Lychnis, however, had had nothing to do with the preventive andcleansing work that had ended the career of these invading microbesso speedily; her work had been the help and care of the sick.Something came through to the intelligence of Mr. Barnstaple thatmade him think that she was faintly sorry that this work of pity wasno longer necessary. He looked up into her beautiful kindly eyes andmet her affectionate solicitude. She was not sorry Utopia was curedagain; that was incredible; but it seemed to him that she was sorrythat she could no longer spend herself in help and that she was gladthat he at least was still in need of assistance.

　　"What became of those people on the rock?" he asked. "What became ofthe other Earthlings?"

　　She did not know. They had been cast out of Utopia, she thought.

　　"Back to earth?"

　　She did not think they had gone back to earth. They had perhaps goneinto yet another universe. But she did not know. She was one of thosewho had no mathematical aptitudes, and physico-chemical science andthe complex theories of dimensions that interested so many peoplein Utopia were outside her circle of ideas. She believed that thecrest of Quarantine Crag had been swung out of the Utopian universealtogether. A great number of people were now intensely interestedin this experimental work upon the unexplored dimensions into whichphysical processes might he swung, but these matters terrified her.Her mind recoiled from them as one recoils from the edge of a cliff.She did not want to think where the Earthlings had gone, what deepsthey had reeled over, what immensities they had seen and swept downinto. Such thoughts opened dark gulfs beneath her feet where shehad thought everything fixed and secure. She was a conservative inUtopia. She loved life as it was and as it had been. She had givenherself to the care of Mr. Barnstaple when she had found that he hadescaped the fate of the other Earthlings and she had not troubledvery greatly about the particulars of that fate. She had avoidedthinking about it.

　　"But where are they? Where have they gone?"

　　She did not know.

　　She conveyed to him haltingly and imperfectly her own halting andunsympathetic ideas of these new discoveries that had inflamed theUtopian imagination. The crucial moment had been the experiment ofArden and Greenlake that had brought the Earthlings into Utopia.That had been the first rupture of the hitherto invincible barriersthat had held their universe in three spatial dimensions. Thathad opened these abysses. That had been the moment of release forall the new work that now filled Utopia. That had been the firstachievement of practical results from an intricate network of theoryand deduction. It sent Mr. Barnstaple's mind back to the humblerdiscoveries of earth, to Franklin snapping the captive lightningfrom his kite and Galvani, with his dancing frog's legs, puzzlingover the miracle that brought electricity into the service of men.But it had taken a century and a half for electricity to make anysensible changes in human life because the earthly workers were sofew and the ways of the world so obstructive and slow and spiteful.In Utopia to make a novel discovery was to light an intellectualconflagration. Hundreds of thousands of experimentalists in freeand open co-operation were now working along the fruitful linesthat Arden and Greenlake had made manifest. Every day, every hournow, new and hitherto fantastic possibilities of interspatialrelationship were being made plain to the Utopians.

　　Mr. Barnstaple rubbed his head and eyes with both hands and then layback, blinking at the great valley below him, growing slowly goldenas the sun sank. He felt himself to be the most secure and stable ofbeings at the very centre of a sphere of glowing serenity. And thateffect of an immense tranquillity was a delusion; that still eveningpeace, was woven of incredible billions of hurrying and clashingatoms.

　　All the peace and fixity that man has ever known or will ever knowis but the smoothness of the face of a torrent that flies along withincredible speed from cataract to cataract. Time was when men couldtalk of everlasting hills. To-day a schoolboy knows that theydissolve under the frost and wind and rain and pour seaward, day byday and hour by hour. Time was when men could speak of Terra Firmaand feel the earth fixed, adamantine beneath their feet. Now theyknow that it whirls through space eddying about a spinning, blindlydriven sun amidst a sheeplike drift of stars. And this fair curtainof appearance before the eyes of Mr. Barnstaple, this still andlevel flush of sunset and the great cloth of starry space that hungbehind the blue; that too was now to be pierced and torn and rentasunder....

　　The extended fingers of his mind closed on the things that concernedhim most.

　　"But where are my people?" he asked. "Where are their bodies? Is itjust possible they are still alive?"

　　She could not tell him.

　　He lay thinking.... It was natural that he should be given intothe charge of a rather backward-minded woman. The active-minded herehad no more use for him in their lives than active-minded people onearth have for pet animals. She did not want to think about thesespatial relations at all; the subject was too difficult for her; shewas one of Utopia's educational failures. She sat beside him with adivine sweetness and tranquillity upon her face, and he felt his ownjudgment upon her like a committed treachery. Yet he wanted to knowvery badly the answer to his question.

　　He supposed the crest of Quarantine Crag had been twisted round andflung off into some outer space. It was unlikely that this timethe Earthlings would strike a convenient planet again. In allprobability they had been turned off into the void, into theinterstellar space of some unknown universe....

　　What would happen then? They would freeze. The air would instantlydiffuse right out of them, Their own gravitation would flatten themout, crush them together, collapse them! At least they would have notime to suffer. A gasp, like someone flung into ice-cold water....

　　He contemplated these possibilities.

　　"Flung out!" he said aloud. "Like a cageful of mice thrown over theside of a ship!"

　　"I don't understand," said Lychnis, turning to him.

　　He appealed to her. "And now--tell me. What is to become of me?"

　　Section 4

　　For a time Lychnis gave him no answer. She sat with her soft eyesupon the blue haze into which the great river valley had nowdissolved. Then she turned to him with a question:

　　"You want to stay in this world?"

　　"Surely any Earthling would want to stay in this world. My body hasbeen purified. Why should I not stay?"

　　"It seems a good world to you?"

　　"Loveliness, order, health, energy and wonder; it has all the goodthings for which my world groans and travails."

　　"And yet our world is not content."

　　"I could be contented."

　　"You are tired and weak still."

　　"In this air I could grow strong and vigorous. I could almost growyoung in this world. In years, as you count them here, I am still ayoung man."

　　Again she was silent for a time. The mighty lap of the landscapewas filled now with indistinguishable blue, and beyond the blacksilhouettes of the trees upon the hillside only the skyline of thehills was visible against the yellow green and pale yellow of theevening sky. Never had Mr. Barnstaple seen so peaceful a nightfall.But her words denied that peace. "Here," she said, "there is norest. Every day men and women awake and say: What new thing shallwe do to-day? What shall we change?"

　　"They have changed a wild planet of disease and disorder into asphere of beauty and safety. They have made the wilderness of humanmotives bear union and knowledge and power."

　　"And research never rests, and curiosity and the desire for morepower and still more power consumes all our world."

　　"A healthy appetite. I am tired now, as weak and weary and softas though I had just been born; but presently when I have grownstronger I too may share in that curiosity and take a part inthese great discoveries that now set Utopia astir. Who knows?"

　　He smiled at her kind eyes.

　　"You will have much to learn," she said.

　　She seemed to measure her own failure as she said these words.

　　Some sense of the profound differences that three thousand yearsof progress might have made in the fundamental ideas and waysof thinking of the race dawned upon Mr. Barnstaple's mind. Heremembered that in Utopia he heard only the things he couldunderstand, and that all that found no place in his terrestrialcircle of ideas was inaudible to his mind. The gulfs ofmisunderstanding might be wider and deeper than he was assuming.A totally illiterate Gold Coast negro trying to masterthermo-electricity would have set himself a far more hopeful task.

　　"After all it is not the new discoveries that I want to share," hesaid; "quite possibly they are altogether beyond me; it is thisperfect, beautiful daily life, this life of all the dreams of myown time come true, that I want. I just want to be alive here. Thatwill be enough for me."

　　"You are weak and tired yet," said Lychnis. "When you are strongeryou may face other ideas."

　　"But what other ideas--?"

　　"Your mind may turn back to your own world and your own life."

　　"Go back to earth!"

　　Lychnis looked out at the twilight again for a while before sheturned to him with, "You are an Earthling born and made. What elsecan you be?"

　　"What else can I be?" Mr. Barnstaple's mind rested upon that, and helay feeling rather than thinking amidst its implications as thepinpoint lights of Utopia pricked the darkling blue below and raninto chains and groups and coalesced into nebulous patches.

　　He resisted the truth below her words. This glorious world ofUtopia, perfect and assured, poised ready for tremendous adventuresamidst untravelled universes, was a world of sweet giants anduncompanionable beauty, a world of enterprises in which a poormuddy-witted, weak-willed Earthling might neither help nor share.They had plundered their planet as one empties a purse; they thrustout their power amidst the stars.... They were kind. They werevery kind.... But they were different....