FRANKLYN.  Just so.  We had better hold our tongues about it, Con.  We should only be laughed at, and lose the little credit we earned on false pretences in the days of our ignorance.

CONRAD.  I daresay.  But Creative Evolution doesnt stop while people are laughing.  Laughing may even lubricate its job.

SAVVY.  What does that mean?

CONRAD.  It means that the first man to live three hundred years maynt have the slightest notion that he is going to do it, and may be the loudest laugher of the lot.

SAVVY.  Or the first woman?

CONRAD [assenting] Or the first woman.

HASLAM.  Well, it wont be one of us, anyhow.

FRANKLYN.  How do you know?

This is unanswerable.  None of them have anything more to say.

PART III

The Thing Happens

A summer afternoon in the year 2170 A.D.  The official parlor of the President of the British Islands.  A board table, long enough for three chairs at each side besides the presidential chair at the head and an ordinary chair at the foot, occupies the breadth of the room.  On the table, opposite every chair, a small switchboard with a dial.  There is no fireplace.  The end wall is a silvery screen nearly as large as a pair of folding doors.  The door is on your left as you face the screen; and there is a row of thick pegs, padded and covered with velvet, beside it.

A stoutish middle-aged man, good-looking and breezily genial, dressed in a silk smock, stockings, handsomely ornamented sandals, and a gold fillet round his brows, comes in.  He is like Joyce Burge, yet also like Lubin, as if Nature had made a composite photograph of the two men.  He takes off the fillet and hangs it on a peg; then sits down in the presidential chair at the head of the table, which is at the end farthest from the door.  He puts a peg into his switchboard; turns the pointer on the dial; puts another peg in; and presses a button.  Immediately the silvery screen vanishes; and in its place appears, in reverse from right to left, another office similarly furnished, with a thin, unamiable man similarly dressed, but in duller colors, turning over some documents at the table.  His gold fillet is hanging up on a similar peg beside the door.  He is rather like Conrad Barnabas, but younger, and much more commonplace._

BURGE-LUBIN.  Hallo, Barnabas!

BARNABAS [without looking round] What number?

BURGE-LUBIN.  Five double x three two gamma.  Burge-Lubin.

Barnabas puts a plug in number five; turns his pointer to double x; and another plug in 32; presses a button and looks round at Burge-Lubin, who is now visible to him as well as audible.

BARNABAS [curtly] Oh!  That you, President?

BURGE-LUBIN.  Yes.  They told me you wanted me to ring you up.  Anything wrong?