still. I have been reading in the old papers of the movements to
emancipate women that were going on before the discovery of

atomic force. These things which began with a desire to escape
from the limitations and servitude of sex, ended in an inflamed

assertion of sex, and women more heroines than ever. Helen of
Holloway was at last as big a nuisance in her way as Helen of

Troy, and so long as you think of yourselves as women'--he held
out a finger at Rachel and smiled gently--'instead of thinking of

yourselves as intelligent beings, you will be in danger
of--Helenism. To think of yourselves as women is to think of

yourselves in relation to men. You can't escape that
consequence. You have to learn to think of yourselves--for our

sakes and your own sakes--in relation to the sun and stars. You
have to cease to be our adventure, Rachel, and come with us upon

our adventures. ...' He waved his hand towards the dark sky above
the mountain crests.

Section 8
'These questions are the next questions to which research will

bring us answers,' said Karenin. 'While we sit here and talk
idly and inexactly of what is needed and what may be, there are

hundreds of keen-witted men and women who are working these
things out, dispassionately and certainly, for the love of

knowledge. The next sciences to yield great harvests now will be
psychology and neural physiology. These perplexities of the

situation between man and woman and the trouble with the
obstinacy of egotism, these are temporary troubles, the issue of

our own times. Suddenly all these differences that seem so fixed
will dissolve, all these incompatibles will run together, and we

shall go on to mould our bodies and our bodily feelings and
personal reactions as boldly as we begin now to carve mountains

and set the seas in their places and change the currents of the
wind.'

'It is the next wave,' said Fowler, who had come out upon the
terrace and seated himself silently behind Karenin's chair.

'Of course, in the old days,' said Edwards, 'men were tied to
their city or their country, tied to the homes they owned or the

work they did....'
'I do not see,' said Karenin, 'that there is any final limit to

man's power of self-modification.
'There is none,' said Fowler, walking forward and sitting down

upon the parapet in front of Karenin so that he could see his
face. 'There is no absolute limit to either knowledge or

power.... I hope you do not tire yourself talking.'
'I am interested,' said Karenin. 'I suppose in a little while

men will cease to be tired. I suppose in a little time you will
give us something that will hurry away the fatigue products and

restore our jaded tissues almost at once. This old machine may
be made to run without slacking or cessation.'

'That is possible, Karenin. But there is much to learn.'
'And all the hours we give to digestion and half living; don't

you think there will be some way of saving these?'
Fowler nodded assent.

'And then sleep again. When man with his blazing lights made an
end to night in his towns and houses--it is only a hundred years

or so ago that that was done--then it followed he would presently
resent his eight hours of uselessness. Shan't we presently take

a tabloid or lie in some field of force that will enable us to do
with an hour or so of slumber and rise refreshed again?'

'Frobisher and Ameer Ali have done work in that direction.'
'And then the inconveniences of age and those diseases of the

system that come with years; steadily you drive them back and you
lengthen and lengthen the years that stretch between the

passionate tumults of youth and the contractions of senility. Man
who used to weaken and die as his teeth decayed now looks forward

to a continuallylengthening, continually fuller term of years.
And all those parts of him that once gathered evil against him,

the vestigial structures and odd, treacherous corners of his
body, you know better and better how to deal with. You carve his

body about and leave it re-modelled and unscarred. The
psychologists are learning how to mould minds, to reduce and

remove bad complexes of thought and motive, to relieve pressures
and broaden ideas. So that we are becoming more and more capable

of transmitting what we have learnt and preserving it for the
race. The race, the racialwisdom, science, gather power

continually to subdue the individual man to its own end. Is that
not so?'

Fowler said that it was, and for a time he was telling Karenin of
new work that was in progress in India and Russia. 'And how is

it with heredity?' asked Karenin.
Fowler told them of the mass of inquiry accumulated and arranged

by the genius of Tchen, who was beginning to define clearly the
laws of inheritance and how the sex of children and the

complexions and many of the parental qualities could be
determined.

'He can actually DO----?'
'It is still, so to speak, a mere laboratory triumph,' said

Fowler, 'but to-morrow it will be practicable.'
'You see,' cried Karenin, turning a laughing face to Rachel and

Edith, 'while we have been theorising about men and women, here
is science getting the power for us to end that old dispute for

ever. If woman is too much for us, we'll reduce her to a
minority, and if we do not like any type of men and women, we'll

have no more of it. These old bodies, these old animal
limitations, all this earthlyinheritance of gross

inevitabilities falls from the spirit of man like the shrivelled
cocoon from an imago. And for my own part, when I hear of these

things I feel like that--like a wet, crawling new moth that still
fears to spread its wings. Because where do these things take

us?'
'Beyond humanity,' said Kahn.

'No,' said Karenin. 'We can still keep our feet upon the earth
that made us. But the air no longer imprisons us, this round

planet is no longer chained to us like the ball of a galley
slave....

'In a little while men who will know how to bear the strange
gravitations, the altered pressures, the attenuated, unfamiliar

gases and all the fearful strangenesses of space will be
venturing out from this earth. This ball will be no longer enough

for us; our spirit will reach out.... Cannot you see how that
little argosy will go glittering up into the sky, twinkling and

glittering smaller and smaller until the blue swallows it up.
They may succeed out there; they may perish, but other men will

follow them....
'It is as if a great window opened,' said Karenin.

Section 9
As the evening drew on Karenin and those who were about him went

up upon the roof of the buildings, so that they might the better
watch the sunset and the flushing of the mountains and the coming

of the afterglow. They were joined by two of the surgeons from
the laboratories below, and presently by a nurse who brought

Karenin refreshment in a thin glass cup. It was a cloudless,
windless evening under the deep blue sky, and far away to the

north glittered two biplanes on the way to the observatories on
Everest, two hundred miles distant over the precipices to the

east. The little group of people watched them pass over the