rch 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