Limanora the island of progress
fact they classified the vegetal world not merely according to the
structure and methods of growth and propagation, but mainly according
to the particular utility of the products. The one classification was
more essential to their creation of new species, the other to their
discovery of purposes for which new species might be created. Like all
their sciences, botany was nothing if it was not creative.
Having discovered the oxygen-storing shrub, the Floramo gave a new
bent to it, applying their energies to strengthening its vitality and
its vitalising powers, and to finding out the most convenient form in
which to use its treasured energy. Aided by the Sidramo they were able
to combine the juice of the fruits of the floronal and the germabell
with the paste of the nut of alfarene into minute, to my eyes almost
microscopic, globules, each of which would support one of their
couriers in the ether outside of our atmosphere for several hours. At
first they lost one of the vitalising elements in securing another;
and even after they had been able to bind the three essences together
in one form, it gave air and sustenance for only a few minutes when
they tried it in a complete vacuum. But after experimenting for many
months, they were able to concentrate these essences under enormous
pressure and by the aid of electric stimulus into a form which would
not volatilise except in the saliva of the mouth and under electric
stimulus. They were also able to give their globules such electric
power as would utilise the streams of magnetic energy that filled the
ether. Thus the ether-couriers found them far more strengthening and
sustaining just above the earth’s atmosphere than in it. One globule
lasted several hours longer in a vacuum, and made breathing and the
other vital functions more easy and enjoyable. Thus was opened up to
them by this discovery a long vista of investigation. The new type of
sustenance and oxygenation was so concentrated that the couriers into
the sky could carry with them enough to serve through months.
During the next great period of discovery the Sidramo superseded
this use of alfarene by a more rapid method of concentrating air. As
usual they followed up the steps of the Floramo, and created what the
botanical families had found in nature. The use of great pressure in
the manufacture of the sustenant globules in their final form suggested
the track they should take; and the immense accumulation of energy in
Rimla and the rapidly increasing faculty of concentrating it on any
point or purpose gave them the requisite power. They came to reduce air
to liquid, and finally to solid and permanent, form. And, following up
the lead of this discovery, they applied greater and greater pressures,
and were at last able to transform with ease and without danger any
element into gaseous, liquid, or solid form. They contracted the slow
processes, that in terrestrial nature covered myriads of ages, into a
few minutes or hours, and thus again multiplied indefinitely their vast
treasures of power in Rimla.
A pioneering production, the book of elemental transformations,
foreshadowed the discoveries to which this would lead. Ether, it was
shown, would be transformed into any desired substance, as soon as its
constituents and formation were found out. Even modes of motion, like
sound and light and electricity, would, with this vast expansion of
the possibility of compression, and the growing power of amalgamating
and concentrating forms of energy, come to be bottled up in liquid or
solid form for any required period. A block of latent sound or latent
light or latent electricity would be as common as a block of ice.
Another pioneer, the book of abbreviation of geological time, opened
up a second vista of power that the discovery pointed out. Nature
took geological ages to perform most of her processes; but in great
passions she accomplished as much in a few minutes. The safe imitation
of these creative and destructive paroxysms was certain to be one of
the conquests of Limanoran posterity. For the actual concentration of
power in Rimla was as nothing compared with what it would be in the
future. Now they were able to contract the work of years into minutes;
then would they be able to leap in one moment across geological ages.
Time was the inertia of realisation and creative power. The whole drift
of their civilisation was towards the mastery of finite periods of
time. Years were to them what minutes had been to their ancestry; to
their far posterity geological ages would be as brief as years were to
them. Swifter and more swiftly would they eliminate from their creative
processes the reluctant element of time, and feel that they were pacing
in the footsteps of eternity.
As it was, they soon put the liquefaction and solidification of
the elements to countless uses. A few of these were the cooling of
their buildings by concentrated air, the use in the arts of its
corrosive power and of its power of rendering most metals easily
plastic, its amalgamation with other elements into an explosive
matter so destructive as to supersede the use of the leomoran in
earth-perforation, and the storage of their faleenas with supplies for
expeditions that would take years in interstellar space.
A minor use to which they put alfarene was the production of vacuums.
They had long had mechanical air-pumps, that gave them the vacuums
they needed for their experiments. But they now found it much easier
to enclose one of these snow-stunted shrubs in an air-tight vessel of
transparent irelium, and watch it absorb the air within the walls. The
energy formerly spent on the making of air-pumps was saved, and devoted
to some other useful purpose.
What was still better was the continual experimentation on the human
system carried on by means of these so easily accessible vacuums.
The alfarene vacuum became the daily plaything of the Limanoran, and
he took pleasure in finding out the needs of his body in it, and
the length of time he could endure the pure ether. It was not long
before they knew every difficulty they would be likely to encounter
in crossing from star to star. The minor defects of the body were
easily met after a few years’ study of them by the various scientific
families. But two gave them long pause.
One was the intense cold they were sure to experience. Where there was
no terrene matter or moisture or air to retain the solar or astral heat
that travelled through space, the diffusion of the streams of thermal
energy would render any far voyaging from the earth impracticable. The
experiments to meet this difficulty took three directions. One was
physiological,--to make the body capable of resisting as great a degree
of cold as they would be likely to encounter; this attempt was only
partially successful, and that by slow steps. They brought themselves
to live with pleasure in any cold that could be found in or around
the earth; but it would take many centuries, perhaps geological ages,
to bring endurance up to the pitch of interstellar cold; it would
in fact mean such a sublimation of their bodies as would make them
like spirits. Another direction was chemical,--to produce a regular
atmosphere round the body as it flew, so that it might retain some of
the streams of heat that swept past it; the use of the essence of the
oxygen-plant helped them in this direction to some extent; but the
amount of it that would be needed to keep up such an atmosphere for
years, concentrate it as much as they liked, meant so huge a cargo that
none of their winged cars would be able to bear it above the earth.
The third direction was physical,--to produce as much heat around the
body as would act as a shield against the cold of the ether; this was
the most successful; for there were such torrents of energy ever moving
through interstellar space that it merely needed its utilisation to
solve the problem. One plan, that, when carefully developed, would
ensure success, was a magnetic garment which would cover the whole of
the body and draw to it all the electric energy within a large radius
of it, to be transformed into heat by minute engines distributed all
over the envelope. Another was, to combine the mechanical collection
of electricity from the ether and the full development of the magnetic
powers of the body. Already they had been able to flash lightnings
around them as they flew through the night; and it would need but small
mechanical manipulation to increase this display and to turn it into
heat. Like meteors, they would blaze across space, wrapped in a mantle
of flame.
But this difficulty in the way of flight through the ether was but
slight as against the other defect that their systems had in common
with all terrene bodies. They could develop heat easily enough; but
how were they to keep intact and consistent in a vacuum constitutions
which had been developed under the pressure of an atmosphere? How
would the tissues and the organs of their bodies adjust themselves to
the absence of atmospheric conditions? As they rose above the clouds,
they had long felt as if their limbs and even the molecules of their
bodies were without due subordination and apt to assume individual
independence, even when the spirit grew boldest and most concentrated
in its energy. Their own wings and faleenas that were intended for
upper and rarer altitudes had to be made tougher and more elastic than
for common flight close to the earth. They had to make them at last in
a vacuum, and subject them to all the conditions that met them in the
ether. But it would take myriads of generations, if not of geological
ages, to bring their own bodies into such a state as to bear vacuum
around them for years; and then in their terrene life with such a new
constitution they would be unable to endure so great a pressure as that
of the atmosphere near the earth. The only contrivance that seemed
feasible was a farfaleena enclosing the traveller round, large enough
to hold alfarene supplies for the long voyage, and strong enough to
stand the pressure of an atmosphere within it. This they might manage
after some years of experimentation.
But enclosure within such a narrow space for so long a period, without
the possibility of free movement into the ether, did not attract
them; and any little accident in their machinery or to their supplies
might make their faleena their tomb. Some other line must be taken
by investigation and invention, if stellar migration was to become a
possible and desirable thing.
This line was indicated by discoveries of the Sidralmo or bio-chemical
families, and the Ooaromo or psycho-physiological families. The
Sidralmo had long been investigating the ultimate constituents of
living matter; and again and again, when seeming to be on their track,
they were baffled by the escape of some element, and left with only the
_caput mortuum_ to analyse. Under their clirolans too, powerful
though they were, the principle of life showed itself in many ways to
their senses, and yet evaded all attempt to isolate it. The lavolan,
which showed the inner structure of living bodies as they lived and
moved, brought them nearest of all to the veil that hung over the
secret of vitality. Plants and stationary animal organisms allowed
them full scope for their investigations. In them they could see the
life ebb and flow, as death approached or receded; in them they could
find every material element entering into their composition, and test
with their varied and minute meteorological apparatus all the forms
of energy which moved them; they checked the current of life, and
watched in the plant or animal the elements and energies that remained
comparatively stable and those that deteriorated; they let it die out,