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epub:type="z3998:persona">Pygmalion Hurt. I see I am boring you. Not one of you takes the least interest in science. Goodbye. He descends from the altar and makes for the temple. Several Youths And Maidens Rising and rushing to him. No, no. Don’t go. Don’t be offended. We want to see the artificial pair. We will listen. We are tremendously interested. Tell us all about it. Pygmalion Relenting. I shall not detain you two minutes. All Half an hour if you like. Please go on, Pygmalion. They rush him back to the altar, and hoist him on to it. Up you go. They return to their former places. Pygmalion As I told you, lots of attempts were made to produce protoplasm in the laboratory. Why were these synthetic plasms, as they called them, no use? Ecrasia We are waiting for you to tell us. The Newly Born Modelling herself on Ecrasia, and trying to outdo her intellectually. Clearly because they were dead. Pygmalion Not bad for a baby, my pet. But dead and alive are very loose terms. You are not half as much alive as you will be in another month or so. What was wrong with the synthetic protoplasm was that it could not fix and conduct the Life Force. It was like a wooden magnet or a lightning conductor made of silk: it would not take the current. Acis Nobody but a fool would make a wooden magnet, and expect it to attract anything. Pygmalion He might if he were so ignorant as not to be able to distinguish between wood and soft iron. In those days they were very ignorant of the differences between things, because their methods of analysis were crude. They mixed up messes that were so like protoplasm that they could not tell the difference. But the difference was there, though their analysis was too superficial and incomplete to detect it. You must remember that these poor devils were very little better than our idiots: we should never dream of letting one of them survive the day of its birth. Why, the Newly Born there already knows by instinct many things that their greatest physicists could hardly arrive at by forty years of strenuous study. Her simple direct sense of space-time and quantity unconsciously solves problems which cost their most famous mathematicians years of prolonged and laborious calculations requiring such intense mental application that they frequently forgot to breathe when engaged in them, and almost suffocated themselves in consequence. Ecrasia Leave these obscure prehistoric abortions; and come back to your synthetic man and woman. Pygmalion When I undertook the task of making synthetic men, I did not waste my time on protoplasm. It was evident to me that if it were possible to make protoplasm in the laboratory, it must be equally possible to begin higher up and make fully evolved muscular and nervous tissues, bone, and so forth. Why make the seed when the making of the flower would be no greater miracle? I tried thousands of combinations before I succeeded in producing anything that would fix high-potential Life Force. Arjillax High what? Pygmalion High-po-tential. The Life Force is not so simple as you think. A high-potential current of it will turn a bit of dead tissue into a philosopher’s brain. A low-potential current will reduce the same bit of tissue to a mass of corruption. Will you believe me when I tell 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 seen him can conceive. Arjillax If you modelled him, he