THE object of this Part is to bridge, as rapidly and vigorously as possible, the transition from the year 1970 to the year 2054. An age of enormous mechanical and industrial energy has to be suggested by a few moments of picture and music. The music should begin with a monstrous clangour and come down to a smoother and smoother rhythm as efficiency prevails over stress. The shots dissolve rapidly on to one another, and are bridged with enigmatic and eccentric mechanical movements. The small figures of men move among the monstrosities of mechanism, more and more dwarfed by their accumulating intensity.
    An explosive blast fills the screen. The smoke clears, and the work of the engineers of this new age looms upon us. First, there is a great clearance of old material and a preparation for new structures. Gigantic cranes swing across the screen. Old ruined steel frameworks are torn down. Shots are given of the clearing up of old buildings and ruins.
    Then come shots suggesting experiment, design and the making of new materials. A huge power station and machine details are shown. Digging machines are seen making a gigantic excavation. Conveyer belts carry away the debris. Stress is laid on the work of excavation because the Every- town of the year 2054 will be dug into the hills. It will not be a skyscraper city.
    A chemical factory with a dark liquid bubbling in giant retorts, works swiftly and smoothly. Masked workers go to and fro. The liquid is poured out into a moulding machine that is making walls for new buildings.
    The metal scaffolding of the new town is being made and great slabs of wall from the moulding machine are placed in position. The lines of the new subterranean city of Everytown begin to appear, bold and colossal.
    Swirling river rapids are seen giving place to a deep controlled flow of water as a symbol of material civilisation gaining control of nature.
    A fantasia of powerful rotating and swinging forms carried on a broad stream of music concludes this Part.

    Flash the date A.D. 2054.
    A loud querulous voice breaks across the concluding phase of this "Transition" music. "I don't like these mechanical triumphs."
    The voice is the voice of Theotocopulos, the rebel artist of the new era. His face becomes visible, very big on the screen. He speaks with force and bitterness: "I do not like this machinery. I do not like this machinery. All these wheels going round. Everything going so fast and slick. No."
    The camera recedes from him until he is seen to be sitting at the foot of a great mass of marble. He is wearing the white overalls of a sculptor and carries a mallet and a chisel.
    A second sculptor, a bearded man, comes into the picture. "Well, what can we do about it?"
    Theotocopulos, as if he reveals the most obscure secret, "Talk."
    The bearded man shrugs his shoulders and grimaces humorously as if towards a third interlocutor in the auditorium.
    Theotocopulos explodes: "Talk. Radio is everywhere. This modern world is full of voices. I am going to talk all this machinery down."
    The Bearded Man: "But will they let you ?"
    Theotocopulos imperiously: "They'll let me. I shall call my talks, Art and Life. That sounds harmless enough. And I will go for this Brave New World of theirs - tooth and claw."
    Flash back to date.
    A.D. 2054.

A LARGE space, rather than a room, partaking of the nature of a conservatory and large drawing-room. There are neither pillars nor right-angle joins The roof curves gently over the space. Beautiful plants and a fountain in a basin. Through the plants one catches a glimpse of the City Ways. An old gentleman of a hundred and ten years or thereabouts, but good-looking and well-preserved, sits in an arm-chair. A pretty little girl (8-9) lies on a couch and looks at a piece of apparatus on which pictures appear. It has a simple control knob. Some strange pet animal, perhaps a capuchin monkey, is playing with a ball on the rug. A doll in an exaggerated costume of the period lies on a seat.
    Girl: "I like these History Lessons."
    The apparatus is showing Lower New York from above - an aeroplane travelogue.
    Little Girl: "What a funny place New York was - all sticking up and full of windows."
    Old Man: "They built houses like that in the old days."
    Little Girl: "Why?"
    Old Man: "They had no light inside their cities as we have. So they had to stick the houses up into the daylight - what there was of it. They had no properly mixed and conditioned air."
    He manipulates the knob and shows a similar view of Paris or Berlin. "Everybody lived half out of doors. And windows of soft brittle glass everywhere. The Age of Win-dows lasted four centuries."
    The apparatus shows rows of windows, cracked, broken, mended, etc. It is a brief fantasia on the theme of windows done in the Grierson style.
    Old Man: "They never seemed to realise that we could light the interiors of our houses with sunshine of our own, so that there would be no need to poke our houses up ever so high into the air."
    Little Girl: "Weren't the people tired going up and down those stairs?"
    Old Man: "They were all tired and they had a disease called colds. Everybody had colds and coughed and sneezed and ran at the eyes."
    Little Girl: "What's sneezed? "
    Old Man: "You know. Atishoo!"
    The little girl sits up very greatly delighted.
    Little Girl: "Atishoo. Everyone said Atishoo. That must have been funny."
    Old Man: "Not so funny as you think."
    Little Girl: "And you remember all that, great-grand- father?"
    Old Man: "I remember some of it. Colds we had and we had indigestion too - from the queer bad foods we ate. It was a poor life. Never really well."
    Little Girl: "Did people laugh at it?"
    Old Man: "They had a way of grinning at it. They called it humour. We had to have a lot of humour. I've lived through some horrid times, my dear. Oh! Horrid!"
    Little Girl: "Horrid! I don't want to see or hear about that. The Wars, the Wandering Sickness and all those dreadful years. None of that will come again great-grand-dad? Ever?"
    Old Man: "Not if progress goes on."
    Little Girl: "They keep on inventing new things now, don't they? And making life lovelier and lovelier?"
    Old Man: "Yes. . . Lovelier - and bolder. . . . I suppose I'm an old man, my dear, but some of it seems almost like going too far. This Space Gun of theirs that they keep on shooting."
    Little Girl: "What is this Space Gun, great-grandfather?"
    Old Man: "It is a gun they discharge by electricity - it's a lot of guns one inside the other - each one discharges the next inside. I don't properly understand that. But the cylinder it shoots out at last, goes so fast that it goes - swish - right away from the earth."
    Little Girl (entranced): "What! Right out into the sky! To the stars?"
    Old Man: "They may get to the stars in time, but what they shoot at now is the moon."
    Little Girl: "You mean they shoot cylinders at the moon! Poor old moon!"
    Old Man: "Not exactly at it. They shoot the cylinder so that it travels round the other side of the moon and comes back and there's a safe place in the Pacific Ocean where it drops. They get more and more accurate. They say they can tell within twenty miles where it will come back and they keep the sea clear for it. You see?"
    Little Girl: "But how splendid. And can people go in the cylinders? Can I go when I grow up? And see the other side of the moon ! And plump back ker-plosh! into the sea!"
    Old Man: "Oh! They haven't sent men and women yet. That's what all the trouble's about. That's what Theotocopulos is making the trouble about."
    Little Girl: "Theo - cotto----"
    Old Man: "Theotocopulos."
    Little Girl: "What a funny name!"
    Old Man: "It's a Greek name. He's the descendant of a great artist called El Greco. Theótocopu1os - like that."
    Little Girl: "And he makes trouble you say?"
    Old Man: "Oh, never mind."
    Little Girl: "It wouldn't hurt to go to the moon?"
    Old Man: "We don't know. Some people say yes - some people say no. They've sent mice round."
    Little Girl: "Mice that have gone round the moon!"
    Old Man: "They get broken up, poor little beasties! They don't know how to hold on when the bumps come. That's why all this talk of sending a man, perhaps. He'd know how to hold on. . . ."
    Little Girl: "He'd have to be brave, wouldn't he?. . . . I wish I could fly round the moon."
    Old Man: "That in time, my dear. Won't you come back to your history pictures again?"
    Little Girl: "I'm glad I didn't live in the old world. I know that John Cabal and his airmen tidied it up. Did you see John Cabal, great-grand-dad?"
    Old Man: "You can see him in your pictures, my dear."
    Little Girl: "But you saw him when he lived, you really saw him?"
    Old Man: "Yes. I saw the great John Cabal with my own eyes when I was a little boy. A lean brown old man with hair as white as mine."
    A still of John Cabal is shown as we saw him in the council at Basra.
    The Old Man adds: "He was the grandfather of our Oswald Cabal, the President of our Council."
    Little Girl: "Just as you are my great-grandfather?"
    The old man pats the little girl.
    The scene should be wiped out by the next presentation, which shows a hand and an arm on a table. The arm carries a light gauntlet and on the gauntlet is a kind of identification disk on which one reads the words: "Oswald Cabal, President of the Council of Direction."
    Such identification plates on the wrists or arms are a usual feature of the costume of the period.

THIS hand and arm is held for a moment. The fingers drum on the table in a manner reminiscent of John Cabal in Part I. It is an inherited habit. Then the camera recedes to show Oswald Cabal seated in his private room in the administrative offices of the city of Everytown.
    The room is of the same easy style of architecture as the preceding scene. There are no windows and no corners, but across a kind of animated frieze, a band of wall, above Cabal's head, there sweep phantom clouds and waves, waving trees, clusters of flowers and the like in a perpetual silent sequence of decorative effects. There is a large televisor disk and telephone and other apparatus on the desk before Cabal.
    Oswald Cabal is a calmer, younger-looking version of his ancestor. His hair is dark and like all hair in the new world trimly dressed. His costume is of a white silken material with very slight and simple embroidery. In its fineness and whiteness and in its breadth across the shoulders it contrasts acutely with the close black aviator costume of John Cabal.
    Cabal says to an unseen interlocutor: "Then I take it this Space Gun has passed all its preliminary trials and that nothing remains now but the selection of those who are to go."
    The picture broadens out, and we see that Cabal is not alone. He is in conference with two engineers. They wear dark and simple clothes in the broad-shouldered fashion of the age - not leather working-clothes or anything of that sort. In an age of mechanical perfection there is no need for overalls and grease-proof clothing. One sits on a chair of modernist form. (All furniture is metallic.) The other leans familiarly against a table.
    First Engineer: "That's going to be the trouble."
    Second Engineer: "There are thousands of young people applying - young men and young women. I never dreamt the moon was so attractive."
    First Engineer: "Practically the gun is perfect now. There are risks but reasonable risks. And the position of the moon in the next three or four months gives us the best conditions for getting there. It is only the choice of the two now that matters."
    Cabal: "Well?"
    Second Engineer: "There are going to be difficulties. That man Theotocopulos is talking on the radio about it."
    Cabal: "He's a fantastic creature."
    Second Engineer: "Yes, but he is making trouble. It is not going to be easy to choose these young people."
    Cabal: "With all those thousands offering?"
    First Engineer: "We have looked into thousands of cases. We have rejected everyone of imperfect health. Or anyone who had friends who objected. And the fact is, Sir----. We wish you would talk to two people. There is Raymond Passworthy of General Fabrics. You know him?"
    Cabal: "Quite well. His great-grandfather knew mine."
    First Engineer: "And his son."
    Second Engineer: "We want you to see the son, Sir - Maurice Passworthy."
    Cabal: "Why?"
    First Engineer: "He asks to go.
    Cabal: "With whom?"
    Second Engineer : "We think you had better see him. He is waiting here."
    Cabal considers and then lifts his gauntlet and touches a spot on it. A faint musical sound responds. He says "Is Maurice Passworthy waiting. . . . Yes. . . . send him up."
    Almost immediately a panel opens in the wall and a slender, rather lightly-clad, good-looking young man appears.
    Cabal stands up and looks at him. "You want to talk with me?"
    The two engineers bow and retire.
    Maurice Passworthy: "Forgive me, Sir. I came straight to you."
    Cabal: "You ask a favour?"
    Maurice Passworthy: "A very big favour. I want to be one of the first two human beings to see the other side of the moon.
    Cabal. "It means danger. Great hardship anyhow. There is an even chance, they say, you may never come back. And a still greater chance of coming back crippled."
    Maurice Passworthy: "Give me credit for not minding that, Sir."
    Cabal: "A lot of you young people don't mind that. But why should you be favoured?"
    Maurice Passworthy: "Well, Sir, I'm the son of a friend of yours. People seem to feel - you ought not to send two people you do not know----" He leaves his sentence un-finished.
    Cabal: "Go on."
    Maurice Passworthy: "We have talked about this over and over again."
    Cabal: "We? "
    Maurice Passworthy: "You stand for so much in the New World, the Great World of to-day."
    Cabal is leaning against his desk and thinking. He looks keenly at the young man's face. "We? " he repeats.
    Maurice Passworthy: "Both of us. It is her idea even more than it is mine."
    Cabal's mind has already leapt forward to what is coming. "Her idea? Who is she?"
    Maurice Passworthy: "Some one much closer to you than I am, Sir."
    Cabal, quietly: "Tell me."
    Maurice Passworthy: "We have been fellow students these three years."
    Cabal impatiently: "Yes - yes but tell me."
    Maurice Passworthy: "It is your daughter, Sir - Catherine. She says that you cannot possibly send anyone's child but your own."
    Cabal after a pause: "I might have known."
    Maurice Passworthy: "You see, Sir----"
    Cabal: "I see. My daughter.... Funny that I never thought of her as anything but a little girl. Quite out of this. . . . My Catherine."
    Maurice Passworthy: "She is eighteen."
    Cabal: "A ripe age. . . . I'm a little taken by surprise. And you two have thought it all out."
    Maurice Passworthy: "It's so plain, Sir."
    Cabal: "Yes, it's plain. It's just. It is exactly as things ought to be. Exactly. All these other thousands will have to wait their turn. . . . Sit down here. Tell me how first you came to know my Catherine?"
    Maurice Passworthy: "Ever since we began to work together. It seemed natural, Sir. She's so straight and simple. . . ."
    Cabal and Maurice Passworthy sit down for a talk and the pictures fades out. Cabal has still to assimilate this novel idea.

    Close up of Cabal. It is half in hour later. He is no longer in his bureau. He is standing in a dark recess against a gracefully patterned wall. A small clear sound is heard and he attends to the telephone disk on his gauntlet. "Yes. . . . Who is it?. . . Raymond Passworthy. . . . Certainly. . . ."
    He waits for half a second. "Is that Raymond Passworthy? Yes. I have been talking to your son for half an hour. Yes. He is a splendid youngster. . . . You want to talk to me. At your service. . . . I am going to see my daughter at the Athletic Club. He is meeting her there. He has just gone to her. Would you care to walk with me through the City Ways and out through the weather?. . . I'll be with you. . . ."

    Scene changes to a view of one of the high-flung City Ways in the brightly-lit cavernous Everytown of 2055.
    Here for the first time one sees the ordinary social types of the year 2055 at close hand, their costume and their bearing. No one is ragged and only one man is wearing any sort of working costume. He is a gardener and he is spraying some of the flowers. The general type of costume is reminiscent of men's costume in Tudor days, varying very widely between simplicity and ornateness (see Memorandum ante). Some of the young women are very lightly and simply clad, but others are more consciously "costumed." One sees also the very bold and decorative architecture of this semi-subterranean city and the use of running water and novel and beautiful plants and flowering shrubs in decoration. In the sustained bright light and conditioned air of the new Everytown, and in the hands of skilful gardeners, vegetation has taken on a new vigour and loveliness. People pass. People gather in knots and look down on the great spaces below.
    The figures of Cabal and Passworthy come walking across the foreground of this scene. Passworthy is a finer, fitter version, leaner, cleaner and trimmer, of his ancestor the Passworthy of the opening scenes. He walks talking with Cabal for some paces, with the city scene passing panorama fashion behind, and then the two come to a stop, leaning against a parapet looking down on the city and talking earnestly.
    Passworthy: "I grant you the reality of the progress the world has made since the Airmen took control. It has been a century of marvels. But cannot we have too much of progress? Here I agree is a lovely world in which we are living. A little artificial - but admirable at last. The triumph of human invention and human will. Comfort, beauty, security. Our light is brighter than the sunshine outside and never before has mankind breathed so sweet an air. We have got the better of nature. Why should we still drive on so urgently?"
    Cabal: "Because it is in the nature of life to drive on. The most unnatural thing in life is contentment."
    Passworthy: "Contentment! Contentment is Heaven!"
    Cabal: "And this is not heaven."
    Passworthy: "No. Indeed not. When sons rebel against their fathers."
    Cabal: "And fathers listen to their daughters. We are both fathers of rebel children, eh? An old problem, Passworthy. A child that isn't a rebel is a vain repetition. What to do with our sons and daughters? Fathers like you and me were asking that question in the Stone Age."
    Passworthy: "But to hurl them at the moon!"
    Cabal: ."They hurl themselves."
    Passworthy: "Desperate young people. Why should they be willing?"
    Cabal: "Humanity is tough stuff. If is wasn't for the desperate young people it wouldn't have got very far."
    Passworthy: "Anyone who attempts such an expedition must be killed. You know that. Lost for ever on that frozen world."
    Cabal: "They're not going to the moon; They're going round it."
    Passworthy: "That's a quibble."
    Cabal: "They will come back."
    Passworthy: "If I could believe that!"
    Cabal: "The best thing for us both is to believe it."
    Passworthy: "Why, should our children be chosen for a thing like this?"
    Cabal: "Science demands the best."
    Passworthy: "But my boy! Always such an impetuous little devil. All very well for you, Cabal. You are the great- grandson of John Cabal, the air dictator - who changed the course of the world. Experiment is in your blood. You - and your daughter! I'm - I'm more normal. I don't believe my boy would ever have thought of it. But the two of them got together. They want to go together."
    Cabal: "They will come back together. This time there is no attempt to land on the moon."
    Passworthy: "And when is this - this great experiment to be made. How long are we to have them before they go?"
    Cabal (a little disingenuously): "I don't know."
    Passworthy: "But when?"
    Cabal: "When the Space Gun is ready again."
    Passworthy: "You mean some time this year?"
    Cabal: "Soon."
    Passworthy: "In the old days it was different. Fathers had authority then. I should have said 'No,' and that would have settled it."
    Cabal: "Fathers have said 'No' since the Stone Age."
    Passworthy: "And is there no saving of our children from this madness?"
    Cabal: "But would it be saving our children?"
    Passworthy: "Yes - it would."
    Cabal: "For what?"
    Passworthy (bursts out): "Children are born to be happy. Young people should take life lightly. There is something horrible in this immolation - it is nothing less than immolation - at eighteen and twenty-one."
    Cabal: "Do you think I have no feelings like yours? That I don't love my daughter?. . . I'm snatching an hour to-day - just to see her and look at her while I can. All the same, I shall let her go. . . when the time comes."
    Passworthy: "Where are they now?"
    Cabal: "She is away at the Athletic Club in the hills - in training. Your son is there now. Come with me and see them. Face to face with them we may not feel just as we do here. Anyhow it will be well to be with them a bit. . . . It's fine outside. Will you come - do you mind coming out in the weather with me?"
    Passworthy: "Mind? I'm an open-air man. This conditioned air may be better for us with its extra oxygen and so on, and the light here steadier and brighter, but give the old sky and the wind on the heath, brother, and the snow and the rain, the quick change's and the nightfall. I don't really love this human ant-hill in which we live."
    Cabal: "We'll go and talk to the young people."

    The next scene is introduced chiefly to give an exterior view of the new Everytown. The old familiar hill-contour is in the background and quite recognisable, but the old town itself under the open sky has disappeared and given place to a few terraces and exterior structures. There are unfamiliar architectural forms, grass slopes and formal trees. It is very tranquil and beautiful, the apotheosis of Everytown. A few aeroplanes of novel structure pass across the sky. Cabal and Passworthy have changed their costumes to something more suitable for the open air, a fabric of the cloth type instead of silky wear, and they have cloaks. The sky is cloudy, the weather is showery, and in contrast to the serenity of the city the sunlight drifts in patches across the scene. Along a wide highway an almost noiseless traffic of streamlined vehicles that come and go through a great entrance, far more brightly lit than the world outside.
    Passworthy (with an effort to be easy-minded): "Here we are up in the weather. Back to Nature. Well, well - don't you feel the better for it?"
    Cabal: "If I did I should make trouble for our ventilation department. I'l1 confess I like the varying breeze and the shadows of the clouds - now and then."
    Passworthy: "What changes those old hills there have seen in the last two centuries. Prosperity. War. Want. Pestilence. This New Amazing World. Look at it now."
    Cabal: "And the changes they have seen are nothing to the changes they are destined to see."
    Passworthy: "Those old hills there. They are the only things our great-grandfathers would recognise. I suppose they too in their turn will be swept away."
    Cabal: "All things are swept away in their turn. Blame Nature for that, not man."
    Passworthy: "There's some open-air people playing that old game of golf away there. It's a good game. I swing a club a bit myself. I don't suppose you do?"
    Cabal: "I don't. Why should I?"
    Passworthy: "It keeps one from thinking."
    Cabal lifts his eyebrows.
    Passworthy: "It couldn't keep me from thinking to-day anyhow. Oh! I can't keep my mind off it! These young people of ours! My heart aches. I feel it here. . . . I'm out of sorts with this modern world and all this progress. I suppose our city is all very fine and vital, and the countryside trimmer and lovelier - if you like - than it was in the days of competition and scramble. I suppose there is hardly a bramble or a swamp or a thicket left in the world. Why can't we rest at this? Why must we go on - and go on more strenuously than ever?"
    Cabal: "Wou1d you stop all thinking and working for ever more?"
    Passworthy: "Oh, not exactly that."
    Cabal: "Then what do you mean? A little thinking, but not very much? A little work but nothing serious?"
    Passworthy: "Well, Moderation. Go on if you like - but go easily."
    Cabal: "You think I drive? That my sort drives?"
    Passworthy: "If you must have the truth - yes - you drive - damnably."
    Cabal : "No. Nature drives. She drives and kills. She is man's mother, and she is his incessant enemy. She bears all her children in hate and struggle. Beneath this surface of plenty and security she is still contriving mischief. A hundred years ago she did her best with what she found in us, to keep our hands and hearts turned against each other and make us destroy ourselves by war. She added her own peculiar little contribution to that - the pestilence. Well, we won that battle. People forget already how hardly it was won. Now she wants to turn our very success against us, tempt us to be indolent, fantastic, idlers and pleasure-lovers - betraying ourselves in another fashion. A hundred years ago men like you said that war didn't matter, and it was my sort had to end it. And now you say going on doesn't matter. Life couldn't be better. Let the new generation play - waste the life that is in them. . . . A planet-load of holiday makers, spinning to destruction. Just a crowning festival before the dark."

    The Hall of the Athletic Club It is a glazed loggia, a half out-of-doors place, and it has immense windows of flexible glass. Outside are water chutes down which athletes (of either sex) flash with great swiftness. What they do is not very clear. It is as if they skied down a waterfall. You get only a dim impression of people flashing by and of rushing water and a rocky waterfall. A few spectators stand within the loggia, and there is a coming and going of young athletes and visitors. Cabal and Passworthy enter. They approach one of the immense windows. A spectator stands there already. The spectator follows excitedly the feats outside. He leans against the glass. The flexible glass gives to the pressure and presents a distorted view of the rocky scene outside. Then as the spectator withdraws his hand the window adjusts itself.
    Passworthy: "Here again every day someone is injured or killed! Why should anyone be killed?"
    Cabal: "Everything is done to eliminate the clumsy ones before an accident occurs. But how are we to save the race from degeneration unless this sort of thing goes on?"
    Passworthy: "My God! Look at that fellow!"
    Several spectators rush to the windows.
    Cabal: "He's all right."
    Passworthy: "And here they are!"
    He directs Cabal's attention towards the doorway. From the doorway Catherine Cabal and Maurice Passworthy approach Cabal and Passworthy.
    The two young people are now both in athletic costumes, very light, revealing their graceful young bodies. Catherine Cabal is a little shorter than Maurice, pretty and determined. They come forward to greet their parents, a little shyly. Maurice halts. Catherine goes up to her father, looks him in the eyes for a moment, is satisfied by what she sees there, and kisses him. He holds her to him for a moment and then releases her. Neither says a word.
    Passworthy (trying to take things lightly): "Well, young people. What have you been doing?"
    Maurice: "Just a turn at the water chutes. No time for anything else."
    Passworthy: "How many killed to-day?"
    Maurice: "No one. One fellow slipped and broke his thigh - but he's being taken care of. He'll be well in a week. I just missed him as he fell. Or I might have come a cropper too."
    Passworthy: "Isn't life dangerous enough without doing these things?"
    Maurice: "My dear Father, it isn't nearly dangerous enough for a properly constituted animal. Since the world began life has been living by the skin of its teeth. It's used to it and it's built that way. And that's what's the matter with us now."
    Passworthy: "That's your philosophy, Cabal. My boy has learnt his lesson."
    Cabal: "Not my philosophy. The philosophy of the new world."
    Pause.
    Catherine, unable to remain uncertain any longer: "Father, are we to go?"
    Cabal: "Yes - you are to go."
    Catherine: "It is announced?"
    Cabal: "Yes."
    Passworthy, dismayed: "It's announced?"
    Cabal: "Why not?"
    Passworthy: "But - my son! "
    Cabal: "The boy is of age. He has volunteered."
    Passworthy: "But I want to talk it over first. I want to talk it over. Why have you announced it so soon? Anyhow there is still plenty of time to talk it over."
    A pause. Very intense scrutiny of faces. Catherine and Maurice look at each other and then at their parents.
    Maurice: "Not so very long now, Father."
    Catherine seems about to speak but does not do so.
    Passworthy: "I suppose we have some months yet."
    Catherine: "It is just one month and three days. Everything is ready now."
    Maurice: "We could go now. The moon is coming into the right position even while we are talking. But they are waiting a month longer. To make sure."
    Passworthy: "You are going in four weeks! Four weeks! I forbid it!"
    Cabal: "I thought----"
    Maurice: "No, it's all arranged."
    Passworthy: "That man Theotocopulos is right. This thing mustn't be. It is human sacrifice. Maurice, my son!"
    Cabal takes his arm.
    Cabal: "There is still a month and more ahead of us. Let us talk it over calmly, Passworthy. There is a month yet. This is a shock to you. It was a shock for me. But perhaps it is less dreadful - and something greater - than you think. Consider it for a day or so. Let us all dine together - let us meet in three days' time, and tell each other plainly all that we have in our minds."

    Cabal is shown in close-up with Passworthy: "I won't come back to the city with you. There is someone else to whom I must talk. I have to talk."
    Passworthy: "No one is as closely interested as we are."
    Cabal: "I don't know. She has a kind of claim. Many people would say it was as strong a claim as ours."
    Passworthy: "And who is that?"
    Cabal: "Catherine's mother. The woman who used to be my wife. . . . Didn't you know I had a wife? Or do you think Catherine came suddenly out of my head? Like Pallas Athene? I had a wife and she was very much a woman and we parted years ago."

    Evening passes to twilight. After-sunset glow in the sky. A terrace with clipped yew trees (new type of yew) looking out over a wide landscape with the sea in the distance. Standing out against the sea is a huge heavy mortar-like structure. This is the Space Gun. It is our first sight of this. It crouches monstrously, dwarfing every other detail in the landscape. A certain mistiness enhances, if anything, its portentous dimensions.
    An aeroplane sweeps down and its shadow passed across the terrace.
    A momentary glimpse is given of Cabal descending from the plane he has flown to this place. Then the camera returns to the terrace to await him.
    Cabal enters and walks slowly to the terraced balustrade. He stands musing, looking at the Space Gun. His hands are behind his back. So he remains for some moments.
    He turns at a footfall and Rowena enters. Rowena is the descendant or Roxana, the favourite of the Boss of Everytown in 1970, just as Oswald Cabal is the descendant of John Cabal. She is physically like her prototype - the part is played by the same actress - but she has none of the arms-akimbo dash of her ancestress. She is better bred. She is dressed much more beautifully and with nothing of Roxana's sluttish magnificence, and her gestures are well under control.
    Rowena: "And so at last I am permitted to see you again."
    Cabal: "You heard the news quickly, Rowena."
    Rowena: "It is all over the world now."
    Cabal: "Already?"
    Rowena: "On the air everywhere. The whole world talks of nothing else. Why have you done this thing to me? Our daughter!"
    Cabal: "I did not do this to you. She determined to go. What do you want with me?"
    Rowena: "You are a monster. You and your kind are monsters. Your science and your new orders have taken away your souls and put machines and theories in the place of them. It is well I left you when I did."
    Cabal: "And you have come here - you have insisted on seeing me in order to tell me that - now."
    Rowena: "Not only that. 1 forbid you to send our daughter on this mad expedition."
    Cabal: "Our daughter! My daughter. You left her to me when you went away. And she goes - of her own free will."
    Rowena: "Because you have poisoned her mind. She, I suppose, is one of the new sort of women just as you are one of the new sort of men. Do you think I do not care for her, simply because you have never let me see her?"
    Cabal: "Usually you have been on the other side of the earth. Love-hunting."
    Rowena: "Reproach me! All the same I care. Who left me love-hungry?. . . . Cabal, have you no pity? Have you no imagination? If I cannot forbid - well, then I implore. Think of that body of hers - scarcely more than a child's body - crushed, broken, frozen!"
    Cabal: "I won't. One can think too much of bodies, Rowena."
    Rowena: "Hard you are and terrible. What are you doing with life, Cabal?"
    Cabal: "Soft you are and sensuous. What are you doing with life?"
    Rowena: "You turn it to steel."
    Cabal: "You fritter it away."
    Rowena: "Who made me fritter it away? I have been wanting to meet you face to face for years, and have this out with you. I hated leaving you. But you made life too high and hard for me."
    Cabal: "I hated your going. But you made life too distracted and vexatious for me. I loved you - but loving you was an all-time task. I had work to do."
    Rowena: "What work?"
    Cabal: "The everlasting work of fighting danger and death and decay for mankind."
    Rowena: "Fanatic! Where are danger and death to-day?"
    Cabal: "In ambush everywhere."
    Rowena: "You go out to meet them."
    Cabal: "I had rather be the hunter than the hunted."
    Rowena: "But if you are hunting danger and death all the time, what is there left of life?"
    Cabal: "Courage, adventure, work - and an increasing power and greatness."
    Rowena: "Give me love."
    Cabal: "You left me for that. Poor love-huntress. My love wasn't good enough - not flattering enough - not sedulous enough. Have you ever found that love of your dreams? Was there ever a lover who made you feel as glorious as you wanted to be? Could any lover do that? Wherever you found love, you gripped it as a child plucks a flower - and you killed it."
    Rowena: "Have I been anything but human?"
    Cabal: "No."
    Rowena: "I have loved after my nature. Even if at last I have to grow old and die."
    Cabal: "But let me live after my nature. You may want love, but I want the stars."
    Rowena: "But love too! You wanted human love once, Cabal."
    Cabal: "I wanted my work more."
    Rowena: "But isn't that girl of ours at least human? As I am? Isn't she entitled to the freshness of life - to the novelty of life? Is she to begin where you leave off? Suppose after all love does come to an end - gets found out? Why shouldn't she have her years of delusion and excitement?"
    Cabal: "And end in futility? Left behind by all your loving? Painted? In all imitation of youth? Clinging to passion?"
    Rowena: "Oh, you can sting. Which of the two is futility? To obey your impulses or deny them? That girl, I tell you, is a human being, and she has to follow the human way. She's a woman."
    Cabal: "Not one of the old sort, Rowena. Not of your sort. Do you think that everything else in human life is going to alter, scale and power and speed, and men and women remain as they have always been? This is a New World we are living in. It drives to new and greater destinies. And that desperate old love story which has been acted and told so often, as though it was the very core of life, is almost finished with."
    Rowena: "And you think she has finished with it?"
    Cabal: "What do you know of our daughter? What do you know, you love-huntress, of the creative drive a woman can feel as well as a man? She has loved and she loves; she has found a mate and they are driving on together. Shoulder to shoulder. Almost forgetting each other in their happy identification. She lives for the endless adventure - as he lives for the endless adventure. And that is the increase of human knowledge and power - for ever. . . ."
    Rowena: "Cabal, all men are fools about women. All of them. That girl of yours. And your endless adventure! You think she is a new sort of woman. There is no new sort of woman. She flies off - with her lover. Well, what sort of woman wouldn't - old sort or new sort? What could be more glorious?"
    Cabal: "Anyhow she shall fly off."
    Rowena: "The new sort of man seems to me to be very like the old sort of mule. Now tell me, tell me, if men are going to give themselves to this everlasting adventure of yours, what is to become of women?"
    Cabal: "There's no sex in that sort of adventure. It is as open to you as it is to us. Drop the old sex romance. Come and work with us."
    Rowena: "Work with you!"
    Cabal: "Why not? You have hands and brains."
    Rowena: "You mean, my dear, work for you. There speaks the old sort of man asking woman to be his slave. When it comes to women, is the new sort of man any different from the old?"
    Cabal: "Why for us and not with us?"
    Rowena: "Because you men have a way of taking the lead and getting hold of things."
    Cabal: "Very well! For us if you like. And why not? Pick your man for the work he does, and the powers he has. Follow him and be his woman?"
    Rowena: "We, we women, are to help and comfort and cherish - play the role of handmaid - to the end of things?"
    Cabal: "If that's how you are made, and it seems to be how you are made; why not?"
    Rowena: "It isn't how we are made."
    Cabal: "If you are not made for knowledge and power as men are, if you are not made to serve knowledge and power, then what on earth are you made for? If you are more than a love-huntress, what do you dream you are hunting?"
    Rowena: "Oh, we argued like this fifteen years ago?"
    Cabal: "Fifteen years ago! This argument began before the Stone Age."
    Rowena: "And it will end----! Will it ever end?"
    Cabal: "Never for us, Rowena. Never - for generations yet. You go your way after your fashion-and I go mine."
    Rowena: "And that is your last word for me - you who once knelt at my feet!"
    Old memories come back to Cabal, a rush of forgotten emotions. He turns towards her. He seems full of things he cannot express and he says nothing.
    Fade out of the two facing each other in the twilight, man and woman, bereaved of all the illusion they ever had for one another and still - perplexed.

    Cabal is in his brightly-lit office again. He still wears his out-of-doors cloak and he sits down with a certain weariness. He turns to the apparatus on his desk. "And now let us hear what Mr. Theotocopulos has to say about it all. This is the time for him."
    He touches a button.
    "I want to hear and see Theotocopulos. He must he talking now upon the mirrors everywhere."
    Then the scene is changed to a great open space in which a big crowd has assembled before a gigantic screen at the head of a flight of stairs.
    Theotocopulos is seen in the midst of a group of friends. He is no longer in his sculptor's overalls. He is dressed in an ornate, richly-embroidered, coloured satin costume, with a great cloak about him which he flourishes dramatically. He is ascending by the side of the gigantic screen in comparison with which he and his party are quite minute. They glance at the crowd and their voices are lost in the general babble. They pass behind the gigantic mirror and then suddenly Theotocopulos appears in the mirror, vastly magnified, and his voice dominates all other sounds.
    The crowd of small figures sways with excitement as he prepares to begin.
    Then the picture goes back to Cabal sitting in his study and preparing to listen to the discourse of Theotocopulos. The room is silent. Then a confused sound like the sound of a crowd is heard and the televisor disk becomes cloudy. Cabal makes an adjustment and the sounds and the picture become clear together.
    The televisor disk advances so as to occupy the great area of the screen. It is framed below by Cabal's head and shoulders.
    "What is all this Progress? What is the good of this Progress? Onward and onward. We demand a halt, we demand a rest. The object of life is happy living. . . ."
    Cabal: "One would think the object of life was everlasting repetition."
    "We will not have life sacrificed to experiment. Progress is not living, it should only be the preparation for living."
    Cabal stands up, walks a few paces away from the disk, and turns to hear more.
    "Let us be just to these people who rule over us. Let us not be ungrateful. They have tidied up the world. They have tidied it up marvellously. Order and magnificence is achieved, knowledge increases. Oh God, how it increases!" (Laughter.)
    Cabal grimly: "So they laugh at that."
    "Still the hard drive goes on. They find work for all of us. We thought this was to be the Age of Leisure. But is it? We must measure and compute, we must collect and sort and count. We must sacrifice ourselves. We must live for - what is it? - the species. We must sacrifice ourselves all day and every day to this incessant spreading of knowledge and order. We gain the whole world - and at what a price! Greater sacrifices and still greater. And at last they lead us back to the supreme sacrifice the sacrifice of human life. They stage the old Greek tragedy again and a father offers up his daughter to his evil gods."
    With an impatient movement Cabal extinguishes the televisor. "And that voice is sounding over all the world. I wonder what the world is making of it."
    He faces his apartment.
    "We might suppress it.
    "Make an end of free expression. That would be the beginning of the end of progress.
    "No. They have to hear him, and make what they can of him. But I wish I could be all over the world now, listening with very listener. What will they make of him?"

This is a sequence of scenes and passing shots to portray the enormous range and the simultaneousness of thought and discussion in the new world. The discourse of Theotocopulos goes on almost uninterruptedly except for occasional shouts and outcries, until at last he comes to his end. He appears in different mirrors and in different frames and at times he is heard and not seen. But the reality of a single person being able to speak to the whole world, so far as it is interested and will listen, and the swiftness with which a common response can be evoked at the same time in every part of the earth where listeners can be found, is made plain. We see first of all the backs of a considerable number of people who are dining together. They give a glimpse of the fashions of 2055, and the tableware of an eating place. They look up at a large frame in which Theotocopulos is seen and heard talking. The crowd is attentive, but displays little reaction to his speech. Then the flash passes to the edge of a swimming pool or to the border of a lawn on which a number of young people in athletic clothing applaud a wrestler who has just put down an antagonist. A man stands up and switches on a televisor and everybody listens. Some of them mutter comments to each other and opinion is divided. Then one passes to a number of scientific people working in a laboratory. Theotocopulos is seen talking on the televisor. One man is irritated and says: "Oh, stop his nonsense." Theotocopulos is switched off. Then an Oriental young woman with a fan, reclining indolently on a couch under a window that looks out upon palms, listens gravely to an oval televisor on which Theotocopulos continues his speech. Then there is a mountain hut with a glass window giving upon a violent snowstorm. Two workers in arctic costume occupy the hut; one lies on a bed; the other sits at a table and listens to the voice. They switch it off. "I suppose that rubbish appeals to the crowds in the town. What do they know of real work?"
    A group of modellers is seen in a studio. It is large, but not fundamentally different from an art studio of to-day. There have been no great changes in the plastic arts. In the background is the televisor. An artist is focusing this and Theotocopulos becomes visible and audible. . . .
    First Modeller: "Hear! Hear!"
    Second Modeller: "No! No!"
    He turns the televisor off. "A man has a right to do what he likes with himself."
    First Modeller: "Never. That Space Gun ought to be destroyed. And now!"
    Third Modeller: "The things ought to stop. Look!" He takes up a model.
    All: "Good for Theotocopulos."
    Fourth Modeller: "But here!" He holds up an ugly caricature of Cabal. (Laughter.)

    This is the discourse of Theotocopulos which is distributed over these scenes.
    "These people who are so kind as to manage our world for us declare that they leave us free to do as we please, they assert in season and out of season that never has there been such freedom as we have to-day. And as the price of this limitless freedom we enjoy, they ask us to ignore the hard and dreadful persistence of their own inhuman researches. But is our freedom really the freedom they pretend it is? Is a man free who cannot protest at what he sees and hears? We want the freedom to arrest. We want the freedom to prevent. Have they the right to use the resources of this world to torment us by the spectacle of their cruel and mad adventures? Have they the right to mar the very peace of our starry heavens by human sacrifices?
    "In the old days, as we all know, there lay deep dark shadows on the happiness of men, and these shadows were called religions. You have heard of them. Puritanism and the mortification of the flesh, shaven heads and cropped spirits. Thou shalt and Thou shalt not, oppressing the free hearts of men. You have learnt about these tyrannies of the spirit in your histories. Those old religions were bad enough with their sacrifices and vows - their horrible celibacy, their gloomy chantings, their persecutions and inquisitions. We thought we were free of religions for ever. But have they really left us - or have they merely adopted new names and fresh masks? I tell you this science and exploration of theirs is no more and no less than the spirit of self-immolation returning to the earth in a new disguise. No more and no less. It is the old black spirit of human subjugation, Jove, the pitiless monster, coming back in the midst of our freedom and abundance - the old dark seriousness - the stern unnecessary devotions. What has brought it back? Why have we all this insistence on duty and sacrifice for the young, on discipline, self-restraint and strain now? What is the need for it how? What does it mean? What does it portend? Make no mistake about it! The servitudes they put upon themselves to-day they will impose upon the whole world to-morrow. Is man never to rest, never to be free? A time will come when they will want more cannon fodder for their Space Guns - when you in your turn will be forced away to take your chance upon strange planets and in dreary and abominable places beyond the friendly stars. I tell you we must stop this insensate straining towards strange and inhuman experiences - and we must stop it now. I say: an end to this Progress. Make an end to Progress now. We are content with the simple sensuous, limited, lovable life of man and we want no other. Between the dark past of history and the incalculable future let us snatch to-day - and live. What is the future to us? Give the earth peace and leave our human lives alone."
    A phosphorescent drusy cavity deep in the earth. A drusy cavity is a cavity in a rock into which minerals have been free to crystallise for immemorial ages. There are big dark and light crystals in crowded confusion. Into this the nose of a borer pierces its way laterally and comes to a stop. It withdraws and two young men and a girl, in shiny, white, close-fitting clothes with glow lamps on their foreheads, creep into the cavernous space.
    First Young Man: "Here we are ten miles below the surface. And no molten rock but instead this Aladdin's cave."
    The Girl: "And precious stones! What wouldn't my great-grandmother have given for them!"
    Second Young Man: "I wonder what is going on up above."
    He is carrying a small televisor on his chest in the position of a breast-pocket and he swings it into position to look at it. The others look also over his shoulder. The televisor shows Theotocopu1os bowing and turning away. Sound effect: a rush of applause.
    The Girl: "It's Theotocopulos. He's finished. But we know what he had to say. We have heard it all before. Is there anything else?"
    First Young Man: "Theotocopulos is an old imbecile."
    Second Young Man: "The dear little children are not to take risks any more for ever. Just play with their little painties and sing their little songs.''
    First Young Man: "And find out nice new peculiar ways of making lovey-povey."
    Second Young Man: "But mind, you, that stuff is going to stir up a lot of the lazy people in the towns. They hate this endless exploration and experimenting. What business is it of theirs? It's a sort of envy they feel. It wounds their pride. They do not want to do this work themselves, but they cannot suffer anyone else to do it. . . ."

    The scene changes to the crowd which has assembled before the great central screen behind which Theotocopulos has been talking. The crowd is dispersing, and we see their faces.
    One man says to another: ''He's right. The Space Gun is an offence to every human instinct.''
    A Woman: "If I was that man Passworthy I would kill Cabal.''
    A Man: ''It makes me long for the good old days when there was honest warfare and simple devotion to honour and the flag. Space Guns indeed! What is the world coming to?"
    The Woman: "I wish I'd lived in the good old days before all this horrible science took possession of us."

    Three very old men sit in a pretty vine-covered arbour drinking and talking. They are hale and hearty. They might well be least good-looking old gentlemen of sixty. Like all the people of the new age, their abundant hair is trim and neat - but artificially silvered.
    First Old Man: "To-day is my birthday."
    Second Old Man: "And how much is that?"
    First Old Man: "A hundred and two."
    Second Old Man: "I'm only ninety-eight."
    Third Old Man: "But I score a hundred and nine."
    First Old Man: "Where should we have been a century ago?"
    Second Old Man: "Under the earth."
    First Old Man: "Or worse."
    Third Old Man breaks into song: "Oh your glasses raise to the good old days."
    Chorus: "Gout and rheumatics and toothless jaws."
    Solo: "That are gone for ever, to God be praise.
    The dark and the haste and the dirty ways.
    Diabetes and body rot,
    Deafness and blindness, the pitiful lot."
    Chorus: "Gout and rheumatics and toothless jaws."
    Third Old Man: "Of ancient men in the good old days."
    They drink to each other.
    First Old Man, after an appreciative pause: "And that's one for Theotocopulos."

    A nursery of children. Anno 2055. They play with plasticine, draw on sheets of paper (as they do at Dartington), build with bricks or run about after each other. There may he a Siamese or white Persian kitten in the party or tame red squirrels scampering about.
    Two women in the foreground converse.
    First Woman: "In 1900 one infant in every six died in the first year. Now it is the rarest thing in the world for an infant to die."
    Second Woman: "Was it one in six?"
    First Woman: "That was the best in all the world. That was the English rate. And out of every hundred women who bore children, three were doomed to die. Think of it: Thousands of them every year. Death in childbirth is now a thing unheard of. But that was the natural way of life."

    A very great scientific laboratory in the year 2055. It is in tier above tier in a huge space, so that there are hundreds of workers, men and women, mostly clad in white overalls, visible. Scientific work has become multitudinous. They work at benches and tables. At certain points there are vivid splutterings of light. In the foreground two men are watching some brightly illuminated globes and tanks in which small fish-like creatures are seen moving, not very distinctly.
    Their attention is called to something off the screen and there enters a woman carrying a very intelligent-looking little dog.
    First Scientific Worker: "Hullo! What have you got there?"
    The Woman: "This is the last word in Canine Genetics. Pavlov started this work in Russia, six score years ago. Look at this little dear. It can almost talk. It will never have distemper. It will live to be thirty, good and strong. And it runs like the wind. Wag your tail, my darling, and thank Uncle Science for your blessings."
    Somebody shouts to the other workers: "The Dog up to date. Come and look."
    Workers on various of the tiers leave their benches and come down to see. Others intent on their work disregard the excitement. A little crowd assembles about the new specimen.
    Second Scientific Worker: "We must teach him to bite Theotocopulos."
    Third Scientific Worker, with disgust: "Oh! Theotocopulos."'
    The Woman: "The dear old world! I suppose you and I would have been working in a slum for fourpence an hour. Instead of being friends with the very best little dog in the world." Petting. "Ain't it? Yess."
    Crowd about the dog.
    First Scientific Worker: "Most of us would hardly have learnt to read - and we should have been clerks and drudges."
    Second Scientific Worker: "Or out-of-works."
    The Woman: "And now there is always something new and something exciting. Oh! save me from that natural life of man."
    First Scientific Worker: "What is the natural life of man?"
    Second Scientific Worker: "Lice and fleas. Endless infections. Croup to begin with and cancer to finish. Rotten teeth by forty. Auger and spite. . . . And yet these fools listen to Theotocopulos. They want Romance! They want flags back. War and all the nice human things. They think we are Robots - and that drilled soldiers in the old days weren't. They want the Dear Old World of the Past - and an end to all this wicked Science!. . ."

THE scene is an ante-room to the dining alcove where Cabal, Passworthy, Catherine and Maurice are to dine. They dine at half-past four or five, for dinner has got back to the hours it had in the seventeenth century and lunch has disappeared. People breakfast, dine and sup, and there is a great variety about the meal hours because there is no twenty-four hour alternation now of light and darkness.
    The alcove is a sort of glazed balcony projecting over one of the great City Ways. When the glass is closed it is quite silent. When it is opened sounds come up from below On a couch Maurice and Catherine sit close together and very content with each other. They look up as if through the transparent ceiling at something in the air and then stand up as Passworthy appears through a small door that leads from above.
    Passworthy: "And so we've had our three days for reflection. Haven't you two thought better of it?"
    Maurice: "We couldn't think better of it, Father. Don't make things hard for us."
    Passworthy to Catherine: "Where is your father?"
    Catherine: ''He was coming here with me, but he had a call from Morden Mitani, who had something urgent to say to him."
    Passworthy: "Morden Mitani?"
    Catherine: ''The Controller of Traffic and Order. My father waited behind to talk to him.''

    Cabal's apartment. Cabal is greeting Morden Mitani, who is an efficient good-looking man in a dark costume. Cabal says: "I was starting out to dine in the Cupola buildings. I am already overdue."
    Morden Mitani: "Then I won't keep you late talking. I will come with you towards the Cupola through the City Ways. It will be best like that. There are things I want you to see and know about."

    One of the City Ways. Morden Mitani and Cabal walk across the scene and arrive at a vantage point on a high bridge looking down over a great arena far below.
    Mitani: "That is what I want you to see.
    Far below a little straggle of people is gathering into a sort of procession. Camera shot at them from high above. They are singing a song of revolt.
    Cabal: "What are they doing? Is it some procession? It straggles a lot."
    Mitani: "That's - what do they call it? A demonstration. Trouble."
    Cabal: "But what's the trouble?"
    Mitani draws him back behind a pilaster. Other people come to the bridge in order to see the crowd below. They do not observe Cabal and Mitani.
    Confidential close up of Cabal and Mitani. Mitani (in a low tone): "That is the outcome of Theotocopulos. He ought never to have been allowed to talk on the mirrors.''
    Cabal: "The world must have free speech. We can't go back on that. People must think for themselves."
    Mitani: "Then the world will have to have policemen again. Just to keep people from acting too quickly on a chance suggestion."
    Cabal: "What can he do?"
    Mitani: "People are taking him very seriously. They are taking him very seriously. They want to stop the firing of the Space Gun by force. They talk of - how do they put it? - rescuing the victims."
    Cabal: "But what is this? If the victims choose to go?"
    Mitani: "Still they object."
    Cabal: "And if they object?"
    Mitani: "They will interfere with things. They are making - what did they use to call it? - an insurrection. That down there is insurrection."
    Cabal: "Against whom?"
    Mitani: "Against the Council."
    Cabal: "An insurrection! I cannot imagine it. In the past insurrections were risings of downtrodden classes - and now we have no downtrodden classes. Everyone does a share in the work and everyone has a share in the abundance. Can mankind rise against itself? No. That down there is just - a little excitement. What can Theotocopulos do with it?"
    Mitani: "He gathers large crowds. That sort of thing is going on all over the city. We have no police, no troops, no weapons nowadays to keep crowds in order. We thought that was done with for ever. 'Rescue the victims from Cabal,' he says. He keeps on against you. 'Rescue the victims from Cabal.'"
    Cabal: "Isn't one of them my daughter? - My only daughter.''
    Mitani: "He says that merely shows your hardness of heart - shows what a monster science may make out of a man. He compares you with those Greek parents who sent their children to the Minotaur."
    Cabal: "And if I sent other people's children and saved my own?"
    Mitani: ''You'd be in the wrong with him anyway.''
    Cabal: "But after all - what can he do?"
    Mitani: "There is the Space Gun out on the seashore. It is hardly guarded at all. Nothing has been guarded on this planet for the past fifty years."
    Cabal: "Then you'll have to organise some sort of guard. After all you have your way-men and your inspection planes. That ought to be enough. And if there is much disturbance - isn't there still the Gas of Peace?"
    Mitani: "There is none."
    Cabal: "Is there none?"
    Mitani: "Officially anyhow. There has been no need of it. The world has been orderly because it has been happy, and it has been happy because everyone has had something to do. There has been no reason to keep any of that gas. There has been no use for it for seventy years. But now I want to call up the Council and get a sanction to make it at once - and use it if need be."
    Cabal: "Call the Council, but won't that take too long?"
    Mitani: "Well, I have been anticipating a little. I have been having some made."
    Cabal: "That is right. We can endorse that."
    Mitani: "In a few hours some tons at any rate will be ready and our planes will be ready to distribute it. But still it will take a little time. Some hours, perhaps."
    Cabal: "That old Gas of Peace. We shall hate to use it again. But if the people will not give us the freedom of outer space - we shall have to use it."
    Mitani: "I have your support then in what I am doing?"
    Cabal: "Fully. Yet all this is incredible to me. Insurrection! Against exploration! Mankind turning upon science and adventure. Wanting to call a halt. It's a mood, Mitani."
    Mitani: "It is a dangerous mood."
    Cabal: "It's a fit of nerves - at the thought of stepping off this planet and leaping into space. Well - first we must save the gun.''
    Mitani: "That first."
    Mitani goes and Cabal approaches the screen.
    Cabal in soliloquy: "Have we been making the race too hard for Humanity? Humanity! What is Humanity? Is it Theotocopulos? Is it dear old Passworthy? Is it Rowena? Is it I?"

    The dining alcove far below the stree1s are seen The meal is nearly finished Cabal, Passworthy, Catherine and Maurice. Maurice touches a button, and a plate with fruits arrives on a glassy band. Maurice puts the plate on the table Catherine and he begin to eat Passworthy does not eat He looks at the young people. Presently he speaks.
    Passworthy: "Isn't life good enough for you here? Here you are in a safe and lovely world. Young lovers. Just beginning life. And you want to go into that outer horror! Let someone go who is sick of life."
    Catherine: "They want fit young people, alert and quick.
    And we are fit young people. We can observe, we can come back and tell."
    Passworthy: "Cabal! I want to ask you one plain question. Why do you let your daughter dream of going on this mad moon journey?"
    Cabal was sitting silently in thought. Now he looks at his
    daughter and answers slowly: "Because I love her. Because I want her to live to the best effect. Dragging out life to the last possible second isn't living to the best effect. The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat. The best of life, Passworthy, lies nearest to the edge of death."
    Catherine stretches Out her hand to him. Cabal takes Catherine's hand.
    Passworthy: "I am a broken man. I do not know where honour lies."
    Cabal to his daughter: "My dear, I love you - and I have no doubt."
    Maurice: "A century ago, no man who was worth his salt hesitated to give his life in war. When I read about those fellows in the trenches----"
    Cabal: "No. Only a few men gave their lives in war. Those few men were caught in some tragic and noble necessity. What the rest did was to risk their lives - and that is all you two have to do. You two have to do your utmost to come back safe and sound. And you are not the only ones who are taking risks to-day. Have we not men exploring the depths of the sea, training and making friends with dangerous animals and with danger in every shape and form, playing with gigantic physical forces, balancing on the rims of lakes of molten metal----"
    Passworthy: "But all that is to make the world safe for Man - safe for happiness."
    Cabal: "No. The world will never be safe for man - and there is no happiness in safety. You haven't got things right, Passworthy. Our fathers and our fathers' fathers cleaned up the old order of things because it killed children, because it killed people unprepared for death, because it tormented people in vain, because it outraged human pride and dignity, because it was an ugly spectacle of waste. But that was only the beginning. There is nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution did not abolish death or danger. It simply made death and danger worth while."

    Morden Mitani enters suddenly. He is in a state of intense excitement. Cabal stands up abruptly with an anxious face.
    Mitani: "Cabal! The gun is in urgent danger. It is race against time now to save it. Things have happened very rapidly. Theotocopulos is out with a crowd of people already. He is going to the Space Gun now. They are going to break it up. They say it is the symbol of your tyranny."
    Cabal: "Have they weapons?"
    Mitani: "Bars of metal. They can smash electric cables. They can do no end of mischief."
    Cabal: "Are there no weapons on our side? Cannot your traffic control produce a police?"
    Mitani: "Very few. . . . We have nothing but the Gas of Peace. And it isn't ready. It will take hours yet. There are some young people we can gather. We must hold this crowd back - at any cost - for a time; until the Gas of Peace can be brought up."
    Passworthy at a window "Look!"
    Cabal and the rest come to the window. Passworthy points to the streets far below. He opens the window. Sudden sound effects. Camera follows his eyes from above Crowd marching and singing their song of revolt Cabal and his party looking down.
    A technical assistant hurries in and goes up to Mitani. He speaks, but is inaudible. Cabal makes gesture to the window, which Mitani closes. Noise cut off.
    Assistant: "It is a riot. It is barbarism come back."
    Cabal: "Who are you?"
    Assistant shows the identification disk on his gauntlet. Disk with inscription "William Jeans Astronomical Staff - Space Gun."
    Mitani: "They must go foot. We have stopped the air ways. They will take an hour or more to get there. Even those who have started already. And then they will hesitate."
    Assistant: "That gun must not be broken up. That vast piece of work. The pity of it! - if they smash it! When the trial experiments have all been made! When everything was ready!"
    Maurice: "When everything was ready." He is struck by a thought; he looks at Catherine. Catherine understands him.
    Passworthy: "And if they smash up this infernal gun - then honour is satisfied and you need not go."
    Maurice: "Oh, Father! Father!"
    Cabal: "They won't smash the gun."
    Maurice, eagerly to assistant: "Suppose the gun was fired now? Would the cylinder reach the moon?"
    Assistant, looking at his watch: "It would miss now and fly into outer space. But. . . it is now five. If the gun is fired about seven. . . ."
    Catherine: "And . . . it could be?"
    Assistant: "Yes."
    Maurice and Catherine look at each other. They understand each other.
    Catherine: "Then. . . ."
    Maurice: "We go now."
    Cabal: "And why not?"
    Assistant: "That is perfectly possible."
    Passworthy cries out: "I protest! . . . Oh! I don't know what to say. Don't go. Don't go."
    Maurice: "If we don't go now - we may never go. And all the rest of our lives we shall feel that we have shirked, and lived in vain. . . . This supremely is what we two are for. . . . Father, we have to go."
    A tunnel leading out of the city. Effect of mob marching to the gun. Effect of mob coming out of tunnel.
    Mob groups from different city entrances collecting together and marching to the gun. (This mob, by the by, is as well dressed as any other people in the film. It has the well-groomed look which is universal to the new world. It is not a social conflict we are witnessing. It is not the Haves attacked by the Have-Nots; it is the Doers attacked by the Do-Nots.)

IN an aeroplane. Cabal, Passworthy, Catherine and Maurice. They are flying to the gun. They look out of the windows. The gun is seen in the distance like a great metallic beast brooding among the hills.
    Through the windows we see next that the plane is descending vertically close to the Space Gun. First clouds, then cliff, and then through great girders, cables and machinery. The plane comes to rest close to the colossal shock absorbers of the gun.
    Mitani meets Cabal, Passworthy, Catherine and Maurice as they are getting out of the aeroplane, and they look upwards at the gun. The camera reveals the massive proportions of this structure.
    The Space Gun, monumental, tremendous, overwhelming. On the framework are young athletes who discover Catherine and Maurice and hail them enthusiastically. Catherine and Maurice go towards their friends. Fraternal reception.
    Cabal, Passworthy and Mitani follow slowly.
    They come to a lift. Cabal and Passworthy stand at the entrance. Mitani is beside the door.
    Mitani to Cabal: "Go up to the platform. We can guard this below."
    Cabal and Passworthy enter the lift.
    The lift arrives on a high platform a score of yards or so below the level of the cylinder which is to be shot at the moon. This hangs at present over the mouth of the gun; and is held by almost invisibly delicate metal supports.
    Cabal comes out from the lift upon this high platform, followed by Passworthy. Cabal goes to a railing and looks down. Camera follows Cabal's eyes and shows the Space Gun from above. In the distance are Theotocopulos and his crowd advancing through the Supports towards the Space Gun. Cabal, Passworthy, Catherine, and Maurice stand on platform. They look up. The cylinder is seen close above their heads being lowered slowly towards the muzzle of the gun.
    The insurrectionary song increases in volume as it draws nearer
    Theotocopulos and his mob appear. They appear at the edge of the cliff, they come up against the sky and no difficulties in production must he allowed to minimise the dramatic effect of their appearance upon the cliff edge.
    They stop abruptly - (the song stops also) - and they stare. Shots of Theotocopulos and his crowd staring upward.
    The cylinder being lowered until it hangs at the mouth of the gun.
    Theotocopulos discovers Cabal and points: "There is the man--"
    Cries of indignation.
    Camera passes slowly over to Cabal across the framework and structures about the gun, giving the impression of a great gulf between the two men. The subsequent conversation is shouted by means of amplifiers across a great space. These amplifiers must be indicated, but not obtrusively.
    Behind Cabal are Passworthy, Catherine and Maurice. A young mechanic approaches them.
    Mechanic: "Everything is ready."
    There is a moment of tension
    Catherine takes a quite silent leave of her father. Maurice grips Passworthy's hands in both of his in an attempt to reassure him and give him courage and dignity.
    Catherine and Maurice turn away, followed by the mechanic. A close-up of Cabal shows his face distressfully calm.

    Theotocopulos (off): "There is the man who would offer up his daughter to the Devil of Science"
    Cabal becomes aware of these words, and is roused by them; he walks to the railing and addresses Theotocopulos: "What do you want here?"
    The picture now passes to Theotocopulos and remains with him during the subsequent talk Cabal is heard but not seen.
    Theotocopulos: "We want to save these young people from your experiments. We want to put an end to this inhuman foolery. We want to make the world safe for men. We mean to destroy that gun."
    Cabal: "And how will you do that?"
    Theotocopulos: "Oh! we have electricians with us too."
    Cabal: "We have a right to do what we like with our own lives - with our sort of lives."
    Theotocopulos: "How can we do that when your science and inventions are perpetually changing life for us - when you are everlastingly rebuilding and contriving strange things about us? When you make what we think great seem small. When you make what we think strong seem feeble. We don't want you in the same world with us. We don't want this expedition. We don't want mankind to go out to the moon and the planets. We shall hate you more if you succeed than if you fail. Is there never to be rest in this world?"
    The picture returns to Passworthy and Cabal on the platform.
    Passworthy has listened to the dialogue suffering mutely. Now he turns upon Cabal. But he shouts for everyone to hear.
    Passworthy: "Yes, I too, ask you, is there never to be rest? Never? This is my son. And he has rebelled against me. What he does, he does against the instincts of my heart. Cabal, I implore you. Is there never to be calm and happiness for mankind?"
    A tremendous outburst greets his words from the mob. The picture passes to the crowd. They begin to move by a common impulse towards the Space Gun. We see them first as a flash of faces and then from very far off. They are seen then like a streaming multitude of ants pouring across the floor of a big room.

    The top of the Gun with the cylinder in its muzzle. Catherine and Maurice stand by a screw door, which resembles the window of a liner's port-hole, in the bottom of the cylinder. They have special clothes on now, very simple, and close to the body. They are assisted by mechanics to take their places within the cylinder.
    Flash back to the crowd scrambling down lattices from the cliff edge towards the Gun.
    Inside the cylinder which is lit from below. Catherine and Maurice, hanging to their handfasts, spread eagle fashion. The faces of the mechanics are seen below Maurice looks at Catherine.

    Maurice: "Do you want to go back?
    Catherine smiles: "Hold firm, my dear."
    The door of the cylinder is screwed in slowly - gradually the scene becomes dark, until it is quite dark, and the faces and figures of Catherine and Maurice are lost in the darkness.
    The crowd is seen swarming upon the framework over against the gun.
    On the platform, Mitani looks down at the crowd and then at his wrist watch. He looks up at the cylinder.
    The cylinder from below. It is very slowly lowered and it disappears entirely into the gun. Its supports are detached and retire.
    The crowd is seen clambering amidst the framework at the base of the gun.
    Cabal is seen standing alone. He is moved by his own thoughts and feelings to speech. He comes to the railing: "Listen, Theotocopulos! If I wished to give way to you I could not. It is not we who war against the order of things, but you. Either life goes forward or it goes back. That is the law of life."
    Theotocopulos dismisses the argument by a gesture: "We will destroy the gun."
    His following shout agreement and resume their scattered unplanned advance.
    Cabal and Passworthy are seen on the platform and in the background stands a mechanic in front of the small heavy open door of a concussion chamber. Cabal leans over a railing watching the crowd below.
    Cabal (shouting down): "Before you can even reach the base of the gun, it will be fired. Beware of the concussion."

    He turns back. Passworthy motionless. Cabal pulls Passworthy towards the heavy door.
    The mob is seen on the ground swarming about the gun supports. People, many of whom carry heavy metallic bars, are attempting to injure, the big metallic masses.
    A table in an observation chamber. A hand rests by a button, waiting. There is a clock dial with a long delicate seconds hand.
    Cabal's voice: "Beware!"
    "Beware of the concussion."
    The crowd hesitates. The noise of a heavy iron door as it clangs shut. A silence of expectation. The crowd realises it is too late. It wavers and then turns and begins to clamber down through the lattices into which it has struggled, and to run away in the spaces below the gun.
    The table and the hand in the observation chamber. The seconds hand of the clock dial moves towards a marked point. As it does so the finger extends and presses a button.
    Thud.
    Large scale effects of concussion. Gun recoiling. Whirlwind sweeping the crowd.
    Theotocopulos, standing out against the sky on a great metal girder, is caught in the whirlwind, and his cloak is blown over his head. He is left struggling ridiculously in his own cloak, and that is the last that is seen of him.
    Clouds of dust obscure the screen and clear to show the crowd after the shock. Some press their ears as if they were painful, others stare under their hands up into the sky.
    Then the crowd begins to stream back towards the city. Shots of them re-entering the city, in a straggling aimless manner, and pausing ever and again to stare at the sky.

    A observatory at a high point above Everytown. A telescopic mirror of the night sky showing the cylinder as a very small speck against a starry background Cabal and Passworthy stand before this mirror.
    Cabal: "There! There they go! That faint gleam of light."
    Pause.
    Passworthy: "I feel - what we have done - is monstrous."
    Cabal: "What they have done is magnificent."
    Passworthy: "Will they return?"
    Cabal: "Yes. And go again And again - until the landing can be made and the moon is conquered. This is only a beginning."
    Passworthy: "And if they don t return - my son and your daughter? What of that Cabal?"
    Cabal (with a catch in his voice but resolute): "Then presently others will go."
    Passworthy: "My God! Is there never to be an age of happiness? Is there never to be rest?"
    Cabal: "Rest enough for the individual man. Too much of it and too soon, and we call it death But for MAN no rest and no ending. He must go on - conquest beyond conquest. This little planet and its winds and ways and all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him Then the planets about him, and at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time - still he will be beginning"
    Passworthy: "But we are such little creatures. Poor Humanity. So fragile - so weak."
    Cabal: "Little animals, eh?"
    Passworthy: "Little animals."
    Cabal: "If we are no more than animals - we must snatch at our little scraps of happiness and live and suffer and pass, mattering no more-than all the other animals do - or have done." (He points out at the stars). "It is that - or this? All the universe or nothingness. . . . Which shall it be, Passworthy?"
    The two men fade out against the starry background until only the stars remain.
    The musical finale becomes dominant.
    Cabal's voice is heard repeating through the music:
    "Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?"
    A louder, stronger voice reverberates through the auditorium: "WHICH SHALL IT BE?"

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