ge
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
mountains and vanish into the blue, and then for a time they talked of
the work that the observatory was doing. From that they passed to the
whole process of research about the world, and so Karenin's thoughts
returned again to the mind of the world and the great future that was
opening upon man's imagination. He asked the surgeons many questions
upon the detailed possibilities of their science, and he was keenly
interested and excited by the things they told him. And as they talked
the sun touched the mountains, and became very swiftly a blazing and
indented hemisphere of liquid flame and sank.

Karenin looked blinking at the last quivering rim of incandescence, and
shaded his eyes and became silent.

Presently he gave a little start.

'What?' asked Rachel Borken.

'I had forgotten,' he said.

'What had you forgotten?'

'I had forgotten about the operation to-morrow. I have been so
interested as Man to-day that I have nearly forgotten Marcus Karenin.
Marcus Karenin must go under your knife to-morrow, Fowler, and very
probably Marcus Karenin will die.' He raised his slightly shrivelled
hand. 'It does not matter, Fowler. It scarcely matters even to me. For
indeed is it Karenin who has been sitting here and talking; is it not
rather a common mind, Fowler, that has played about betw