The End of the World · When? · Some Time (2/2)

Flood will advance painlessly and to programme; there’ll be time to plant gopher-trees. The brains of those latter days will compass every chemical trick to combat Drought and postpone his hour, then to foretell the hour beyond which postponement cannot go. They will raise batteries against the Cold, using devices and deftnesses we cannot conjecture, eking out the reduced rations of radiation according to a timetable corrected continually in their favour, and accepting defeat, accurately forecast, only when the sun as ally indispensable can help them no longer. Centuries soon, by high celestial mathematics crash with comet or star will be deduced. Striking-chance, size, speed, noxiousness, all will be published generations in advance. Stellar waverings inconceivably far will constitute the first warnings, and will continue and increase through the first period. The mathematical stage, concluded by disturbances in the orbit of Neptune or of Chronos, named but still to be found,1 will be followed by the stage of telescopic visibility, then by the naked-eye stage, as the foe moves through the six magnitudes till larger than Sirius or the Morning Star at her brightest. Then the seasons will begin to go wrong, and the thermometers, and the clocks. If the first warning is given today, that is at a moment when, as the accredited magicians of the age, astronomers and physicists happen to be enjoying enormous prestige with common men⁠—a prestige they may lose tomorrow to the spiritualists or the mystics or the priests⁠—incredulity, if any, will cede swiftly, and long before the naked-eye period the psychoanalysts of the heavens will have permeated the mass of the people with their prediction.

What then will come to pass? First, covering all men, a slow surge of fear⁠—fear, with Love and self-love, the third director of men’s actions. When fear rises self-love rises with it, and Love goes under. In hearts stripped naked by terror, the beast will hack through and triumph forth; their death before their eyes, their faces turned monstrous with their hearts, cruelly they will fight to get or keep for themselves alone the best places or best chances (if against Cold not the Star, the last stocks of preserved sunlight or synthetic warmth), cruelly rejoicing in the suffering of those whom they deprive or despoil. From craftier hearts “What must I do to be saved?”⁠—all fear-moments are religious moments⁠—will go up in clouds of servile prayer to the advancing star (the dying one), with incense of propitiatory virtue and pious works. In a few heavenly hearts Love will stand firm and victorious, in might of self-sacrifice giving up its share of scant coolness (scant heat) unto others. In the few maddest hearts will shine exultation, glad welcome to death as victory, Annihilation as the Bride. Until, as the heat (cold) waxes, and pain and disease oust (numb) even fear, and the horror of physical suffering blots out even the mental horror at the world’s fate.⁠ ⁠…

Except⁠—who knows? Who knows what happens, as he dies, in the heart of another? Some go fearing, some cursing; some in peace, some in pride; some struggling passionately to live, some knowing that there is nothing better for a man than that he should die; some beholding the darkness, and some the King in His beauty. According to the manner of his individual soul and according to the manner of the general end, so amid these various ways for man’s choosing will he choose to die.

Foreknowledge must be his comfort. By large increase of memory and foresight, by calculus more powerful and machines more marvellous, by telescopes to watch each sunspot on each farthest star, by microscopes to watch each proton and electron at work or play, by subtleties of mind and contrivances of matter that at the last instead of merely adumbrating will seek to direct the destinies of earth and of heaven, by all these and by God’s pity⁠—whichever the way, whatever the end, it will be foretold in time.

In time for what?