ll
you that, even in man himself, the Life Force used to slip suddenly down
from its human level to that of a fungus, so that men found their flesh
no longer growing as flesh, but proliferating horribly in a lower form
which was called cancer, until the lower form of life killed the higher,
and both perished together miserably?

MARTELLUS. Keep off the primitive tribes, Pygmalion. They interest you;
but they bore these young things.

PYGMALION. I am only trying to make you understand. There was the Life
Force raging all round me: there was I, trying to make organs that would
capture it as a battery captures electricity, and tissues that would
conduct it and operate it. It was easy enough to make eyes more perfect
than our own, and ears with a larger range of sound; but they could
neither see nor hear, because they were not susceptible to the Life
Force. But it was far worse when I discovered how to make them
susceptible; for the first thing that happened was that they ceased to
be eyes and ears and turned into heaps of maggots.

ECRASIA. Disgusting! Please stop.

ACIS. If you don't want to hear, go away. You go ahead, Pyg.

PYGMALION. I went ahead. You see, the lower potentials of the Life Force
could make maggots, but not human eyes or ears. I improved the tissue
until it was susceptible to a higher potential.

ARJILLAX [_intensely interested_] Yes; and then?

PYGMALION. Then the eyes and ears turned into cancers.

ECRASIA. Oh, hideous!

PYGMALION. Not at all. That was a great advance. It encouraged me so
much that I put aside the eyes and ears, and made a brain. It wouldn't
take the Life Force at all until I had altered its constitution a dozen
times; but when it did, it took a much higher potential, and did not
dissolve; and neither did the eyes and ears when I connected them up
with the brain. I was able to make a sort of monster: a thing without
arms or legs; and it really and truly lived for half-an-hour.

THE NEWLY BORN. Half-an-hour! What good was that? Why did it die?

PYGMALION. Its blood went wrong. But I got that right; and then I went
ahead with a complete human body: arms and legs and all. He was my first
man.

ARJILLAX. Who modelled him?

PYGMALION. I did.

MARTELLUS. Do you mean to say you tried your own hand before you sent
for me?

PYGMALION. Bless you, yes, several times. My first man was the
ghastliest creature: a more dreadful mixture of horror and absurdity
than you who have not