“But perish they all will. And the fatal sickness that must ere long bring them to their end is caused by this growing refusal to worship them. If mortal beings depend on the sun and the rain, immortal beings depend on our worship of them. If we stop worshipping them, the juice, the sap, the pith, the oil, the ichor, the very blood of their life vanishes; and like plants without sun and air, and plants without earth and water, they simply wither away.”
The fly now became silent; but Nisos heard the moth answering him in her most vehement manner. “I don’t see the use of dead things like sand and rocks and air and water and fire going on when living things like gods and men and insects have vanished away. That would mean that nothing would be left; for if no one knew they were there, there’d be nobody there and everything would be nothing.”
“Your voice, beautiful one,” said the fly, “sounds as if you’d rather like everything to be nothing.”
“I would! I would! I would!” cried the moth; “for then the greatest Priest who has ever lived would be right, and the Pillar and the Club and all the rest of you would be wrong!”
Nisos decided in his own mind that it must have been the abnormal excitement of the club itself that had communicated this tension to its inmates. “Shall I,” he said to himself, “take my hand off its head, and see what happens? My Father’s hardly holding it at all! Suppose I did take my hand off its head would it move of itself? Would it go for this horror?”
Nisos had never in his life been aware of so many cross-currents of thoughts and intentions, of revelations and counter-revelations, of insurrections and counter-insurrections. He was conscious of feelings that whirled one way and of feelings that whirled exactly the opposite way, through his consciousness. It was like being torn in half. With one part of his soul he longed to lift his hand from the club and see the club plunge itself with all the power that killed Nemean Lion into the face of this Mystery enthroned on this dead seaweed!
With the other part of his soul he felt that to see the terrible beauty of this majestic face mauled, crushed, churned up, smashed up, beaten up, pounded up, hammered up, reduced to an indistinguishable paste of pestilential mud and blood would be to assist at the most savage crime that his wickedest imagination had ever pictured. But there was an “I am I” within him that was deeper than his divided soul; and with this he felt that the only conceivable alternative to letting the club obliterate this Ruler of Atlantis was to let the Horror have its way, to give up himself to it with absolute submission, to give up his father Odysseus to it, to give up his friend Zeuks, the son of Arcadian Pan, to it, and, worst of all, to give up to it his girl Arsinöe, the daughter of Hector of Troy. No, no, no, no! He couldn’t let this Being, whatever the mystery of its creative power, whatever the ineffable beauty of its face, whatever its justification as the archenemy of Olympos, triumph over all he loved, unresisted!
He felt too agitated, as the quivering of “Expectation” alias “Dokeesis” under the pressure of his hand indicated that at the withdrawal of his hand the club would act on its own and leap at that unspeakably lovely face bending towards them, to have the calm of mind to do what Odysseus was doing at this moment, namely keeping his eye fixed, not on the Creator-Survivor of Atlantis, but on the great Hunter Orion, who, towering above them, was now examining with the utmost nicety each arrow in his quiver, and as he did so kept turning north, south, east, west, and snuffing at the air for the direction of Typhon’s flight.
But he was absolutely amazed when he heard his father, who like himself was now on his feet, addressing Orion in a calm, quiet, but extremely authoritative voice.
“We have met without meeting, O mighty Orion, and I must request you to kneel down here for a moment at my side. I must ask you to do so in the name of your island of Chios. I must ask you to do so in the name of Merope. I must ask you to do so for the sake of the hide of that sacrificed bull, filled with the mingled semen of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hermes, and buried in the earth for ten months, out of which you were born.”
If the tone of Odysseus and the substance of his words were an astonishment to Nisos it was a still greater wonder to the boy when the towering giant submissively obeyed and knelt down by their side apparently quite indifferent to the fact that while he, a demi-god, was on his knees, they, a pair of mortal men, were on their feet.
Nisos now became painfully conscious of what might have been called the psychic helplessness of the four of them, Odysseus, Orion, the Nemean Club, and himself, arranged in a convenient row, as if they were Hesperidean Apples, to be devoured, one after another, by that Being reclining on the dead seaweed. Nor, it appeared, were any of the four of them very surprised by what they heard, though the tone of the Being’s voice when it first came forth might well have pulverized, or, at any rate, petrified, any one of them, caught by it alone.
It was not only the most scraping and jarring voice that Nisos had ever heard. It was the most mechanical, automatic, and metallic voice. It was a voice like the triumphant screaming of steel when in contact with tin. It was a voice like the voice of every instrument in the Smithy of Hephaistos if they had revolted and taken over for themselves the whole resounding and echoing place. It was not the voice of a god, or a man, or a beast, or a bird, or a reptile, or an insect. It was the voice of a vast reverberating arsenal full of every kind of instrument for every kind of creation and every kind of destruction.
“From now on, to the end of your lives,” the voice from the Entity reclining on the dead seaweed grimly grated like a wheel, or grievously groaned like a plough-share, “you three migrants to my kingdom, of which, as you know, having once come you are forever the loyal subjects, will go about the world proclaiming my kingdom’s laws. These laws will, in their own time and in due course, become the law of the whole earth, the law of every country and race and tribe and nation and people. This law will be absolutely and entirely scientific. As it is born of science, so it will grow, century by century and aeon by aeon, more purely scientific. Its one and sole purpose will be science for the sake of science. It will care nothing about such trifling, frivolous, unimportant matters as faith, hope and charity. It will care nothing about the happiness of people, or the comfort of people, or the education of people, still less, if that be possible, about the virtue or the righteousness or the compassion or the pity or the sympathy of people.
“It will use people — that is to say men, women, and children as it uses animals. It will practise upon them and experiment with them, not for their sake, but always purely and solely, as it ought to be, for the only Purpose, the only Religion, the only Object, the only Ideal, the only Patriotism, the only Cause, Reason or Consideration worth anything in the world—to understand everything that exists in every aspect of its existence.
“For the sake of Science we must create. For the sake of Science we must destroy. For the sake of Science we must go so deeply into the secret of the power of one human mind over another, and of all human minds over the substance of earth, the substance of air, the substance of water, and, above all, the substance of fire, so that in the final event the whole earth will be as completely under control as my ship of state the ‘Teras’. As completely, do I say? O much, much more! For though it will be worked and handled by human beings, just as the ‘Teras’ is worked by Akron and Teknon, and Pontos and Proros, and Klyton and Halios and Euros, they will be scientific human beings, that is to say every man, woman, and child, in the whole world will be dominated absolutely and entirely by me, or by someone appointed by me; and, in this new ‘Teras’ of mine, I shall sail to the furthest limit of the Cosmos carrying my war-cry of ‘Science or Death!’ to the end of Space and Time.”