“This is all very interesting, Mr. Cowan”—­Harvey D. had become uneasy in his chair, and had twice risen to put straight a photograph of the Whipple block that hung on the opposite wall—­“but what we would like to get at—­”

“I know, I know”—­Dave silenced him with a wave of the calabash—­“you want to know what it’s all about—­what it’s coming to, what we’re here for.  Well, I can tell you a little.  There used to be a catch in it that bothered me, but I figured her out.  Old Evolution is producing an organism that will find the right balance and perpetuate itself eternally.  It’s trying every way it knows to get these cells of protoplasm into some form that will change without dying.  Simple enough, only it takes time.  Think how long it took to get us this far out of something you can’t see without glasses!  But forget about time.  Our time don’t mean anything out there in the real world.  Say we been produced in one second from nothing; well, think what we’ll become in another ten seconds.  We’ll have our balance by that time.  This protoplasm does what it’s told to do—­that’s how it made eyes for us to see, and ears to hear, and brains to think with—­so by that time we’ll be really living; we’ll have a form that’s plastic, and can change round to meet any change of environment, so we won’t have to die if it gets too cold or too hot.  We want to live—­we all want to live; by that time we’ll be able to go on living.

“Of course we won’t be looking much like we are now, we’re pretty clumsy machines so far.  I suppose, for one thing, we’ll be getting our nourishment straight from the elements instead of taking it through plants and animals.  We’ll be as superior to what we are now as he is to a hoptoad.”  The speaker indicated Sharon Whipple with the calabash.  Sharon wriggled self-consciously.  “And pretty soon people will forget that any one ever died; they won’t believe it when they read it in old books; they won’t understand it.  This time is coming, as near as I can figure it, in seven hundred and fifty thousand years.  That is, in round numbers, it might be an odd hundred thousand years more or less.  Of course I can’t be precise in such a matter.”

“Of course not,” murmured Harvey D., sympathetically; “but what we were wanting to get at—­”

“Of course,” resumed the lecturer, “I know there’s still a catch in it.  You say, ‘What does it mean after that?’ Well, I’ll be honest with you, I haven’t been able to figure it out much farther.  We’ll go on and on till this earth dries up, and then we’ll move to another, or build one—­I can’t tell which—­and all the time we’re moving round something, but I don’t know what or why.  I only know it’s been going on forever—­this life thing—­and we’re a little speck in the current, and it will keep going on forever.

“But you can bet this:  It will always go on by competition.  There won’t ever be any Utopia, like these holy rollers can lay out for you in five minutes.  I been watching union labour long enough to know that.  But she’s a grand scheme.  I’m glad I got this little look at it.  I wouldn’t change it in any detail, not if you come to me with full power.  I couldn’t think of any better way than competition, not if I took a life-time to it.  It’s a sporty proposition.”