Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1917-09-20
ranIaTn Masferman sat hoIt nnrisht

Captain MasfeFnan sat bolt upright
as he spoke; he looked like some old
prophet spelling out the doom Of man.
| The intense earnestness in his words
shook Paget's fncredulity for a mo-
| ment, and left him sick with horror.
Suppose that civilization, every
thing which has gone to make up the
| life we know-family love, books,
monuments, parliaments, ships-a1 Of
| it is TO be at the mercy of this mer-
| CHESS horde, and that we are going
| TO fight harder than we have fought
| since the days when we held our own
| against the saber-tooth! Who'd think
or care then whether he was an Eng
| lishman or Dutchman; who'd trouble
| whether his friends were white men,
| negroes, HottentOts or Chinese, so
| long as they were human? Wouldn't
| that make for the brotherhood of man,
Donald? Wouldn't we set all our con-
victs free? Wouldn't kings shake
| hands with anarchists and college pro-
fessors with coal beavers? Wouldn't
class and race vanish like dreams
| when the nights over? And maybe
| that's what Gods working for, lieu
tenant!"
But the impossibility, Masterman!
Granting the incredible supposition
that these deep-sea organisms exist,
and could live under a pressure enor-
mously increased, and breathe"
Were supposing that lieutenant"
''How could they survive the strug-
gle for existence in an unnatural ele-
ment?"
Lieutenant, man has existed since
tertiary times, but he never learned
to fly till 1908. He never went up in
a balloon until a hundred and fifty
years ago. Our imaginatiOns can't
rise to the realization of what this
generation has done, but our descend
ants will look on us as demigOdS, and
the Wright brothers will become
myths, like that chap that invented
cooking, Prom-Prom-?"
"Prometheus."
eyes, sir. Well, then, after living
for thousands Of years at the bottom
of five miles of air, an ocean Of oxy-
gen and nitrogen, we've found out how
to get up on top of it. They are liv-
ing at the bottom of an ocean of Oxy-
gen and hydrogen. Suppose they
learned to fly, too!
"You can see what they'd do. Some
of their scouts, who had gone on
ahead, would discover that the dry
IN,
such quantities as these hungry mon
sters had never dreamed about. Food
in solid chunks, instead of dissolved
particles of plankton, varied with an
occasional cannibal dinner. And light
by which to capture it-sunlightl No
more hunting down their prey with
phosphorescent torches!
"At first they'd nibble the grass and
leaves Of the trees. But they'd find
that cellulose is pretty indigestible
stuff. Then one of them would dis
cover a dead bird or rabbit, and an
other that sheep and cattle make good
eating, and then"
"Then man, muttered Donald,
gripping the arms Of his chair. The
madman's picture had become dread
fully real to him.
"Other bodies would follow the
scouts, Donald. They wouldn't be
quite adapted to dry land at first.
They'd make their way along the
river beds. They'd swarm up the Hud-
son, the Rhine, the Severn, the Mis-
sissippi. That's what we did, and
even today we haven't got very far
from the river banks. Well, they'd
rest and recuperate, eating the fish