The Greatest Sci-Fi Books of Erle Cox. Erle Cox
need of a monument, Earani," interrupted Barry.
She shook her head. "Not while his work lives. Think of the results. The average life of mankind at the time of Maxi's invention was about forty-eight years! Within two hundred years the average was well over one hundred years, and later it rose to one hundred and twenty with a maximum of one hundred and sixty. You must understand, too, that a man of one hundred years was not a tottering wreck of humanity, but a being as mentally and physically robust as one of forty in the pre-Maxi days, and many up to one hundred and fifty years retained their faculties to the full, and every step that led to this revolution was solely due to Maxi's lens. Without it even the work of Eukary would have been impossible."
"Ah!" interjected Barry, "and Eukary was the third person of your trinity?"
Earani nodded. "He came two hundred years after the old Doctor, and was one of the worshippers of his memory." She turned to Alan. "He was one of those that nature gives to the world once in a thousand years, like your Napoleon. He rose from the ranks, and for fifty years he ruled the world with a rod of steel. It was not a nation or a confederation that he ruled, but the entire world. He ruled ruthlessly and mercilessly, and when he died he left us a new world and a new religion."
"A new religion is a doubtful sort of legacy," said Alan with a smile.
Barry straightened up. "That's a fact from our point of view, Earani. Every religion that our world has been given so far has been as fatal from a point of mortality as a new disease. You see the converts as a rule have felt it incumbent on them to spread the glad tidings, even if they had to do it with an axe. The unbeliever had to love his enlightener, even if he had to be hammered into doing it. As a consequence, religions generally meant new causes for war, so they have been pretty fatal, taking them all round."
"There's nothing like the hatred that a really bigoted religious fanatic can raise for a rival creed," put in Alan.
"Perhaps Eukary's religion was an exception?" asked Barry.
"He met the usual reward of the reformer," she smiled. "Hate and spite and intrigue–but he was too great to feel or fear them, aye, or to notice them, except where they interfered with his plans."
"And then?" asked Alan.
"And then he struck once–there was never need for a second blow, and he never gave warning. He knew he was right, and he would not let one life or a thousand stand in the way of the future of the race. He taught us the worship of the unborn.
"He started from the theory that if infinite care in breeding be necessary in producing the highest class of animal or vegetable life, then it is so much the more necessary in producing the highest type of human life. We know that a weed can be cultivated until it becomes a splendid flower and that if neglected it will ultimately revert to its original worthless type. We know that the finest class of domestic animals are those that result from careful breeding. And humanity, Dick?" she paused.
"Left to carry on anyhow. It's a tremendous handicap. Reproducing at our own sweet will in the sacred cause of individual liberty, and to the detriment of the race. It's a wonder we have ever pulled through so far, or so well. It can't be helped, anyhow," was Barry's comment.
"It can be altered!" answered Earani decisively. "It has been once in the world's history. Eukary made no move until he had absolutely proved what was afterwards known as Eukary's Law of Transmission. When he propounded that law the world stopped sufficiently long in its work to find that it had discovered a new joke, and when the joke grew stale, both it and he were forgotten. The jesters would not have been so lighthearted had they known their man a little better."
"Curious, is it not?" said Alan, "when you think of it, how some–in fact, nearly all–of the men who have radically affected the world have been considered a subject for a jest in the beginning."
Earani smiled. "I suppose if you could trace the intimate history of the times there were many who jested at Mahomet, Caesar, Napoleon– aye, or perhaps even of your Divine Prophet. It has always been so, and will always be so while fools are born into the world."
"Consider the majority they are, Earani," said Barry with a laugh.
Earani nodded. "We had our share, Dick, but Eukary lowered the average."
Alan made an extravagant gesture of supplication. "Oh! Great Queen, grant us, we implore you, the formula, for never a world of all the worlds needed the boon so much as ours."
"You might demonstrate on us," Barry began.
"Dick, if you are offering me up as a subject, I'll regard it as an unfriendly action, as the diplomats say," broke in Alan.
"Profound self-consciousness, Alan," said Barry, with a laugh. "Let's hear the rest, Earani, and we'll find a subject afterwards."
"The work was not done in a day," said Earani, laughing at their nonsense; "and for thirty years the world at large heard nothing of Eukary. During that thirty years he worked silently at his tremendous plan. It seems incredible now that what was afterwards known as the 'Great Conspiracy' could be formed in secret, but it was so. I can give you no clearer idea of his character than that he could enrol hundreds of thousands of followers under his banner in a plot to place the control of the world in one man's hands, and do it undetected."
"A secret society," said Alan.
Earani nodded. "Exactly, and its members embraced every race and every creed in the world without a single traitor."
"He could not have known them all," said Barry.
"Naturally not," replied Earani; "but that is where the wonderful system and organisation came in. He had a faultless judgment of men in the first place, and selected his immediate followers without making a single error. Then again he had that quality of leadership that turns followers into worshippers.
"When the final blow was struck which made Eukary the master of the world, you must understand that conditions of life were different from those you know at present. War had ceased, and with it the necessity for armaments. By international agreement no weapon of offence might be improved, and the small armed force kept by each confederation had become merely an adjunct of State ceremonial. Amongst the conspirators were the greatest brains of the age, and these invented a weapon that made the movement irresistible."
"It must have been a fairly easy victory, Earani," interrupted Barry; "the resistance could not have been much against such an organisation."
"It was at first. People were too stunned by the blow to offer resistance. It was when they had had time to think that the trouble came. However, Eukary struck, and between the setting of one sun and the rising of another the old order had passed away. So perfectly were the plans laid that in one night the governing bodies of every confederation were removed, and a new administration was substituted."
"Without resistance at all?" asked Barry.
Earani shrugged her shoulders. "Eukary was not a man to allow sentiment to interfere with his plans, and the small regular armed forces might have been used as a nucleus for organised resistance, and so he made such a step impossible. They were exterminated to the last man."
"Eukary seems to have taken Odi for a model," said Dick.
"Possibly," answered Earani, without heeding the tinge of sarcasm in Barry's voice. "His methods never lacked decision, and he was not the man to risk failure through fear of public opinion. However, what you take exception to was nothing to what followed. The success of the revolution was absolute from the beginning. When people came down to their cities on the first day (they still lived in cities at that time) nothing was changed, except that they found proclamations notifying them that their government would be carried on as before, except that all existing and future laws would be subject to revision by a central council, of which Eukary would be the president.
"Eukary was not slow to use his advantage. First he dealt with all public men outside the organisation. They had the position fully explained to them, and were given the option of giving their allegiance without being told the alternative. Many fell in with the plan gladly. Others, for conscientious reasons, refused. Can you guess what