THREE:
THREE:"Stop," cried the Doctor, and there was almost anger in his features as he leapt to his feet. "It is you who are raving now. How can there exist such a world? And what plight has overtaken the human race, that it is now dependent upon mechanical contrivance for its actions! But, no. I refuse to believe that the Clockwork man represents the final destiny of man. He is a myth, a caricature, at the most a sort of experiment. This multiform world of which he talks so glibly is an extravagant boast. Besides, who would care to live in such a world, and with every action conditioned by an exact mechanism? Your optimism about this extraordinary affair amazes me even more than the thing itself. At the best what it means is that man has come to final ruin, not that he has achieved any real mastery of life. If all the creatures in the world eight thousand years[Pg 181] hence are indeed clockwork men, then it is because some monstrous tyranny has come to birth in the race of man; it is because some diabolical plan has been evolved to make all men slaves. The clock may make man independent of time and space, but it obviously condemns him to an eternity of slavery. That is why I am still loath to believe in the evidence of my own eyes. That is why any explanation of this phenomenon is better than the obvious one!"The clock, perhaps, was the index of a new and enlarged order of things. Man had altered the very shape of the universe in order to be able to pursue his aims without frustration. That was an old dream of Gregg's. Time and Space were the obstacles to man's aspirations, and therefore he had invented this cunning device, which would adjust his faculties to some mightier rhythm of universal forces. It was a logical step forward in the path of material progress.
THREE:I bit my lip, turned away and shook my head. "Well, anyhow," he said, "I am told there is nobody in your way."When the Doctor found him, he appeared to be about six weeks old, and rapidly growing smaller and smaller.
TWO:They looked at the Falls from all the points of view. They went under the Canadian side, and they also went under the Central Fall, and into the Cave of the Winds. They stood for a long time watching the water tumbling over Horseshoe Fall, and they stood equally long on the American side. When the day was ended, the boys asked the Doctor if he would not permit them to remain another twenty-four hours.
TWO:"It was like a great shed, and it had the solid ground for a floor. On this floor there were kettles, or pans, set in brickwork, and each one of them had a little furnace under it, in which there was a charcoal fire. There must have been two hundred of these pans, and the heat from them was so great that it almost took away my breath. I don't believe I could exist there a day, and yet there were people who had to spend the entire day[Pg 268] in the firing-room, and go there day after day besides. Many of them were women, and some of them had little children strapped to their backs, and there was a whole lot of children in a little room at one side of the shed, where a couple of women were looking after them. How I did pity the poor things! Fred and I just emptied our pockets of all the small change we could find in them for the benefit of the babies, and I wish we could have given them more. But there was hardly a cry from any of them, and they seemed as happy and contented as though their mothers were queens, instead of toiling over the firing-pan in that hot room for ten or fifteen cents a day.And it was true. Their hoofs rumbled, their carbines banged, and their charge struck three sides of the house at once. Rising only to my elbows,--and how I did that much, stiffened with my wound, the doctors will have to explain,--I laid my cheek to my rifle, and the light of two windows fell upon my gunsights. Every blue-coat in the hall was between me and its rear window, but one besides the officer was wounded, and with these two three others were busy; only the one remaining man saw me. Twice he levelled his revolver, and twice I had almost lined my sights on him, but twice Miss Harper unaware came between us. A third time he aimed, fired and missed. I am glad he fired first, for our two shots almost made one report, and-he plunged forward exactly as I had done over the fire-log, except that he reached the floor dead.