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CHAPTER ONE

Wyndham Smith was at Guy’s Hospital at the time he had his experience, a medical student in his second year.

He looked round a room floored and walled and furnished in the same substance, which was strange to him—“ebonied glass” came to his mind—and across at a man who was strangely dresses—Oriental?—no, not exactly that—and with an aspect of age with in the grave dignity of his face, and of youth in the smooth freshness of his skin, who was saying in a distant and yet not unfriendly way: “I suppose you are puzzled as to where you have come?”

“Once before,” he replied, “I had a dream something like this. I mean, I knew I was dreaming the while I dreamed. I remember hoping I should not wake till the end came; but this is the most vivid dream that I even had.”

The man’s lips moved to a slight smile. “You need have no fear about that.”

“No? I feel as though I were awake now.”

“So you are.”

Wyndham Smith looked round. He considered the polished shadows of the walls, and the brighter opaqueness of the ceiling which gave a diffused light to the room. He was not convinced.

“Then, perhaps,” he said, “You will explain how I got here.”

It was a reasonable request, though he saw that a dream might invent an answer of no reliable value.

“That,” the protagonist of his dream replied, “is what I propose to do. It is a courtesy which I might have extended freely to a young man of your profession, but it is necessary apart from that. It is important here from the early part of the twentieth century. You are now—by an extension of your system of reckoning—in the later part of the forty-fifth.”

“You can’t expect me to swallow that.”

“No? I wonder why. Has the idea of such transmigration, either voluntary or enforced, never entered your mind? Even so, you have had some years of training which should make you receptive to new ideas. I thought that yours was a time when the implications of relativity began to be understood.”

“I am afraid,” Wyndham Smith said honestly, “that I am one of those to whom the implications of relativity are not clear. I am willing to believe that time is the fourth dimension which has a plausible sound. But I don’t go far beyond that. As to people being able to jump about in time, from one age to another, even if it were shown in theory that they could—which would be hard to believe—observation tells us definitely that it doesn’t occur.”

“May I ask how you have been able to observe that?”

“If it did, people would appear suddenly among us from nowhere, and others would disappear in the same way. You couldn’t even take a census.”

“You are half right and half wrong. Your year was nineteen thirty-seven, was it not, in the reckoning of your day?”

“Yes, that’s what it is now.”

“Ye-es. No man has gone back to that period, or is likely to do so. Having known it, you can’t be surprised. But they have been fetched away in large numbers, English people in your century being a favourite selection for many purposes. I learned your language from one of them.”

“I know that isn’t true. If it were, we should notice they had disappeared.”

The older man was unmoved by the bluntness of this contradiction. “If you think,” he said, with a quiet certainty, “you will know that it is…did you never hear of the number of people who disappeared in England at that time—even in London alone—every month? What do you suppose had become of them?”

“I suppose that they had changed their names, or wandered away.”

“Do you know the proportion of them that were never found?”

“Not exactly. I know it was a large number.”

Wyndham Smith remembered reading a newspaper account of such disappearances a few days before. (Was it that which had given him this most vivid dream?) He could not recall the figures, but he knew that the number who were never traced had been described as very large—“inexplicably large” had been the expression used. He was frank about that, both to himself and the stranger to whom he spoke. He added, “But, at most, that doesn’t prove that they disappeared into futurity: it only fails to disprove that anyone did.”

“Yes. But, at least, it proves that you were wrong in the reason you gave for discrediting such a possibility.”

“I must admit that,” he answered with the same frankness as before, and with a growing disposition not to contest the possibility further. After all, why not let a dream have its way?

The stranger seemed to perceive without further words that it was accepted as a hypothesis on which the conversation could be continued. He went on: “It is necessary that you should be informed as to where you are, owing to the experience which is before you, the nature of which will naturally be grasped more readily by one who has had some training in medical science, however elementary, than it would be by most others of the period from which you come.

“It was partially understood in your own time, though the idea itself was less clearly perceived than were its implications and consequences, that the individual man is of dual personality. The seat of the ego—the man himself, as distinguished from the physical body which had been formed from ancestral cell—was vaguely located in the hinder part of the brain, and that location has since been more exactly fixed.

“With the advance of surgery, the grafting or exchange of the major organs of the body naturally led to the consideration of the possibility that the ego itself might be transferred. But that which was simple in theory was found to be difficult in practice, owing to the fact that the cell—if that word be allowed—of which the ego consists was found to be so small that its minuteness is beyond human comprehension, if not measurement; and that, for the operation to be successfully performed, it must be transferred without the remotest trace of surrounding matter,”

“I remember,” Wyndham remarked, accepting the initial improbability to which he had been introduced in his interest in this explanation, “in…in my own time that an American scientist calculated that if the germs from which every Englishman had originated since the Norman conquest were heaped together, they would never cover a needle’s point.”

“That,” the stranger answered, after a moment’s pause, “must have been, by an extremely large margin, within the truth; but the germ-cells of which you speak are themselves as much larger than the essential ego as the space occupied by our planetary system exceeds the size of its central sun.”

“But you say that these difficulties have been overcome?” Wyndham asked.

Since he had decided to abandon himself without resistance to the course of this vivid dream, the quiet authority and assurance of the stranger’s words were bringing conviction to a mind which had been trained to learn and accept surprising facts from the lecturers of his own profession. He had a vague but pleasing vision of himself as being sent back to his own time by this courteous and able stranger after learning such things as would place him in the forefront of the scientists of his time.

Was it—his mind wandered to ask—by this method that the great “discoveries” of past generations had been communicated to those who had given them to the world, without revealing a source of knowledge which would have discounted their own eminence, if it had not been received with derision, or introduced them to a sorcerer’s stake? Was it such an experience that had come to the friend of Paul when, in his own words, “he was caught up to the third heaven, and heard unspeakable things”?

“They have been overcome,” the stranger replied, “but not easily. The operation requires elaborate preparations, and can only be performed at long intervals, and upon not more than four individuals—that is two exchanges—at once.”

“May I ask what is the result of the operation, if every trace of surrounding matter should not be successfully separated?”

“Insanity—at the least. Insanity both to the ego transferred with adhesions which will be foreign to the brain with which new relations must be established, and to that which is introduced to a depleted environment.”

“And if it be successful? I suppose that the knowledge—the memories—”

“You suppose rightly. I see that you perceive some of the limitations of the results of this operation, and the possibilities that remain.”

“I should have thought—”

“Yes. You would have guessed correctly, so far as guessing would be likely to go; and beyond that you would have seen that only experiment could resolve the enigmas your mind would raise. But the time for guessing is past.

“If you will listen carefully, on a matter which is likely to be of the utmost interest to yourself, it is what I propose to explain.”

Wyndham did not like that expression “of the utmost interest to yourself.” He did not like the way it was said. His heart missed a beat. Was he to be the subject of one of these interesting experiments?

The thought was one from which he shrank in a most unscientific spirit. The beauties of vivisection—even its moral altitudes are matters which the vivisected may fail to see. He was glad to recall—which he had been so near to forget—that you cannot die, nor suffer hurt, in a dream. He made no answer; and the stranger, after a moment of keen though quiet scrutiny, as though reading his mind very easily, commenced the explanation he had promised to give.

“I should tell you first that it has been practicable, for a very long period, to transfer all parts of the principal organs of the body, so that the anomaly was no longer possible (for instance) by which a scientist might be frustrated in his work by a defective gall bladder or a sluggish liver, while a common lunatic would be going about with these organs robustly alive. Grafting or substitution would quickly restore the physical harmony which the quality of his work required.

“You will not suppose that such results were achieved without some unexpected difficulties, some unforeseen complications, some inevitable catastrophes. But the practice is now firmly established, and it might be difficult to find a man of more than eighty or a hundred years, one or more of whose vital organs have not been substantially or radically repaired.

“You will see that this custom had beneficent consequences in ameliorating the conditions of the poor, for no child could be born who was not potentially valuable, if not in itself, yet to prolong the existence of others; and to the meanest of mankind there was opened the high, unselfish destiny that his lungs might expand with a monarch’s breath, or his heart beat in a statesman’s breast.

“For those wretched females who were allowed to marry, before the era of the present orderly methods, there was the hope that, if they could produce offspring of more than average quality, and with the requisite regularity, their lives might be indefinitely prolonged by a grateful country; and there were some whose bodies were so successfully repaired or renewed that they lived for more than two hundred years.

“Nor must you suppose that the direct benefits of this advance in surgical science were confined to those who were eminent in the state, or required for the continuance of its population. Purchases and exchanges became frequent among all classes of the community, and no cause of litigation was more common than that arising from this description of bartering. A man complaining, for instance, that he had been led by fraudulent misrepresentation to surrender a sound stomach for a heart with a defective valve. And as you will easily see, that at least three persons, and probably more, must have been directly involved in each of these transactions, for a few men would desire to make a direct exchange of the same organ only, and none would wish to be left with two of the same kind. The equitable adjustment of these disputes might be far from simple, and the cancellation of the contract by the return to a man of his own property might be unfair to an innocent party not directly concerned in the dispute.”

“It is an idea,” Wyndham took advantage of a moment’s pause to remark, forgetting his previous fear in the interest of the subject, “of many fascinating possibilities, but I should suppose that, in such cases as the women you mentioned, whose ages must have been over two hundred, there could be so little of the originals left that the question of identity would arise. Would they not have ceased to be the persons that they first were, and become compilations of other and younger women?”

“It is a question which naturally and necessarily arose at a comparatively early time, when major operations of this kind were first recognized as being of a beneficent and practicable character. It was a line of defence in an ancient and famous trial, when a wealthy criminal distributed his vital organs so freely among his associates (even including some portions of the brain itself) that there arose a serious issue of how far the human form in the dock could be held responsible for the deeds with which it was charged, or how otherwise the criminal could be brought to justice.

“The case actually resulted in an acquittal, it being decided that the man had escaped beyond the possibility of arrest, and it was this trial which led the government of that day to set aside a large fund for the determination of the location of personality in the human body…with an ultimate consequence which has brought you here.”

The last remark was a sharp reminder to Wyndham Smith that his interest in the instruction he was receiving might not prove to be of a merely academic kind. And feeling, like the man about to be hanged, that he could bear anything but suspense, he put the question directly, “And do you mind telling me what that is?”

“It is to that that I was about to come. But, before giving you such information, I wish you to have a clear mind as to the nature and consequence of the transfer of the human ego from one body to another.

“In the first place, our experiments have demonstrated that the ego has an identity absolutely separate from the body which it inhabits, and over which it has a limited muscular control. It follows, as you may have anticipated, that when an ego is transferred, it leaves behind all the memories, all the knowledge, which were stored in the brain which it had previously governed, and acquires the knowledge and memories of the one which it commences to occupy.

“It might be supposed that the practical result would be as though there had been no transfer at all. But this is not so. The ego which enters the body of another inherits the knowledge which that brain has acquired, and the physical dexterities to which it has trained its members, but does not necessarily sympathize with the proclivities which have caused that knowledge to be accumulated, or those physical abilities to develop; it may commence at once to train its acquired brain to other uses, its body to different sports.

“Having explained this, you will understand that if (for instance) your own ego should be removed from your present body and another introduced, the fresh tenant would acquire memory of this conversation, and would therefore readily understand what had occurred on an explanation being supplied. And, in the same way, if you should be transferred to another body, you would be equally so informed if the knowledge had been previously so imparted to the brain of which you would obtain control.”

“You mean,” Wyndham replied, endeavouring to maintain an impersonal attitude towards the subject, and suppressing the cold fear of a more immediate interest, “that if (for instance) my ego were so transferred, I should lose the memories that I now have, with all the knowledge of the time from which you say that I am already so widely removed, and should be dependent upon you to inform me even of the fact of my present identity?”

“That is what the position would be, but, in place of all from which you would have parted, you would have acquired the use of the stores of another brain, and its natural abilities, which might be more—perhaps much more—than those you had left behind, and of which also—it is an equal chance—you might make more energetic and successful use than had the ego by which they were previously controlled.”

“That is quite clear,” Wyndham admitted; “and I can recognize it as logical probability, though it is less easy to accept as a possible eventuality; but may I ask”—and he could not entirely control his voice, as he said this, to the casual tone which he desired to use—“why you should be giving me this information? May I, perhaps, be privileged to watch such an experiment, so that I may describe it when I—” He was near to saying “When I wake: up,” but substituted “When I return to my own time,” as being more courteous to his auditor. For the denizens of a dream cannot desire to be made conscious of their own unsubstantiality, of which even the dreamer may not be aware while the dream endures. But was it really a dream?—if he could only be a little surer of that!

If—it was the next moment’s thought—if he could only awake! For the answer to which he was listening confirmed the worst of his secret dread: “You have—as I can see that you are sufficiently intelligent to anticipate—the exceptional honour of having been chosen from among millions of your time and race to be the subject of such an experiment.”

Wyndham Smith did not respond with an aspect of gratitude to this complimentary assurance. He strove to convince himself that the danger which appeared to threaten him was too remote from reality—too fantastic to fear. Yet if—indeed—

“May I ask whether, if I should submit to so strange an experience, I may ultimately be restored to my own identity?”

“I regret that I cannot reply to that question, for the answer, even if I know it, which you need not assume, will give information to the ego which will shortly control your body, which it might not be convenient for it to have. For the moment I must leave you, there being no more to say.”

As he spoke, the stranger rose from his seat and passed out through the solid-seeming wall, which gave way before him as having no substance whatever.

Wyndham Smith was left alone to consider the fate to which he was incredibly destined. It was a suggestion of fantastic horror, and yet—he remembered a remark which had been made by Professor Kortright at the lecture last Tuesday night. He had explained, as a surprising fact, that a man has no regard for the welfare of the corpuscles, even for the nerves of his own body, so long as he does not share their danger, or while they are powerless to hurt him with any message of their own pain.

He had said that the benefits which had resulted, in certain classes of operations, from the use of local, in addition to general anaesthetics, demonstrated that the general one does not prevent the torture of the isolated nerves, but only frustrates their efforts to awaken those of the brain itself to a kindred anguish.

Yet how many, he asked, would pay an extra fifty pounds, or even ten, to save the nerves of his own limb from such an experience, if assured that he himself would be unable to feel the pain? They would be roused to readier sympathy by some tale of the abuse of a dog in a distant town!

“I myself”—those had been the professor’s words, and in saying them had he not implied all the distinction between the ego and the inhabited body which had been the theme of their discourse of the previous half-hour?

With this thought, there came also the supposition that that lecture might have supplied the idea from which this dream was born. Surely that must be so, and—unutterable relief. It was no more than a dream—indeed, a dream therefore from which it must be possible to wake, and that waking Wyndham resolved that he would no longer delay. Not but that it might have been of interest to penetrate somewhat farther into the fantasy that the dream proposed—if only, while he did so, he could be sure that it were no more.

But the uncertainty was too great to be longer endured. He was resolved to wake from a nightmare which was become too real. And then he found that it was something he could not do. Surely you could wake from a dream? Surely, surely, when you strove to wake with your utmost will, with the whole mind concentrated on what must be the waking vision—the window opposite, which must be visible in the moonlit night (Wyndham remembered that there was a moon that was near the full), the bed-rail, the familiar walls…

But the familiar walls did not return. He saw only the ebonised, glassy surface through which the stranger had so absurdly, so impossibly, passed away. He would resolve for himself if it were substance or shadow that held him now. He rose and walked to the wall.

He felt a substance that was neither cold nor warm, being of the same temperature as the hand that he pressed against it. But otherwise it was polished granite to feel: granite-hard, granite-smooth. He paused at the place where his late companion had vanished, feeling it with patience and care. But it was all equally smooth, equally hard. Very surely it was a dream. But it was a dream that he could not break.