The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth Read online

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  He sat down in a garden, with his back to a house thatoverlooked all London.]

  THE FOOD OF THE GODS AND HOW IT CAME TO EARTH

  H.G. WELLS

  CONTENTS.

  BOOK I.

  THE DAWN OF THE FOOD.

  I. THE DISCOVERY OF THE FOOD

  II. THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM

  III. THE GIANT RATS

  IV. THE GIANT CHILDREN

  V. THE MINIMIFICENCE OF MR. BENSINGTON

  BOOK II.

  THE FOOD IN THE VILLAGE.

  I. THE COMING OF THE FOOD

  II. THE BRAT GIGANTIC

  BOOK III.

  THE HARVEST OF THE FOOD.

  I. THE ALTERED WORLD

  II. THE GIANT LOVERS

  III. YOUNG CADDLES IN LONDON

  IV. REDWOOD'S TWO DAYS

  V. THE GIANT LEAGUER

  BOOK I.

  THE DAWN OF THE FOOD.

  THE FOOD OF THE GODS.

  CHAPTER THE FIRST.

  THE DISCOVERY OF THE FOOD.

  I.

  In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first becameabundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending forthe most part to become elderly, who are called, and who are veryproperly called, but who dislike extremely to be called--"Scientists."They dislike that word so much that from the columns of _Nature_, whichwas from the first their distinctive and characteristic paper, it is ascarefully excluded as if it were--that other word which is the basis ofall really bad language in this country. But the Great Public and itsPress know better, and "Scientists" they are, and when they emerge toany sort of publicity, "distinguished scientists" and "eminentscientists" and "well-known scientists" is the very least we call them.

  Certainly both Mr. Bensington and Professor Redwood quite merited any ofthese terms long before they came upon the marvellous discovery of whichthis story tells. Mr. Bensington was a Fellow of the Royal Society anda former president of the Chemical Society, and Professor Redwood wasProfessor of Physiology in the Bond Street College of the LondonUniversity, and he had been grossly libelled by the anti-vivisectioniststime after time. And they had led lives of academic distinction fromtheir very earliest youth.

  They were of course quite undistinguished looking men, as indeed alltrue Scientists are. There is more personal distinction about themildest-mannered actor alive than there is about the entire RoyalSociety. Mr. Bensington was short and very, very bald, and he stoopedslightly; he wore gold-rimmed spectacles and cloth boots that wereabundantly cut open because of his numerous corns, and Professor Redwoodwas entirely ordinary in his appearance. Until they happened upon theFood of the Gods (as I must insist upon calling it) they led lives ofsuch eminent and studious obscurity that it is hard to find anythingwhatever to tell the reader about them.

  Mr. Bensington won his spurs (if one may use such an expression of agentleman in boots of slashed cloth) by his splendid researches upon theMore Toxic Alkaloids, and Professor Redwood rose to eminence--I do notclearly remember how he rose to eminence! I know he was very eminent,and that's all. Things of this sort grow. I fancy it was a voluminouswork on Reaction Times with numerous plates of sphygmograph tracings (Iwrite subject to correction) and an admirable new terminology, that didthe thing for him.

  The general public saw little or nothing of either of these gentlemen.Sometimes at places like the Royal Institution and the Society of Artsit did in a sort of way see Mr. Bensington, or at least his blushingbaldness and something of his collar and coat, and hear fragments of alecture or paper that he imagined himself to be reading audibly; andonce I remember--one midday in the vanished past--when the BritishAssociation was at Dover, coming on Section C or D, or some such letter,which had taken up its quarters in a public-house, and following two,serious-looking ladies with paper parcels, out of mere curiosity,through a door labelled "Billiards" and "Pool" into a scandalousdarkness, broken only by a magic-lantern circle of Redwood's tracings.

  I watched the lantern slides come and go, and listened to a voice (Iforget what it was saying) which I believe was the voice of ProfessorRedwood, and there was a sizzling from the lantern and another soundthat kept me there, still out of curiosity, until the lights wereunexpectedly turned up. And then I perceived that this sound was thesound of the munching of buns and sandwiches and things that theassembled British Associates had come there to eat under cover of themagic-lantern darkness.

  And Redwood I remember went on talking all the time the lights were upand dabbing at the place where his diagram ought to have been visible onthe screen--and so it was again so soon as the darkness was restored. Iremember him then as a most ordinary, slightly nervous-looking dark man,with an air of being preoccupied with something else, and doing what hewas doing just then under an unaccountable sense of duty.

  I heard Bensington also once--in the old days--at an educationalconference in Bloomsbury. Like most eminent chemists and botanists, Mr.Bensington was very authoritative upon teaching--though I am certain hewould have been scared out of his wits by an average Board School classin half-an-hour--and so far as I can remember now, he was propounding animprovement of Professor Armstrong's Heuristic method, whereby at thecost of three or four hundred pounds' worth of apparatus, a totalneglect of all other studies and the undivided attention of a teacher ofexceptional gifts, an average child might with a peculiar sort of thumbythoroughness learn in the course of ten or twelve years almost as muchchemistry as one could get in one of those objectionable shillingtext-books that were then so common....

  Quite ordinary persons you perceive, both of them, outside theirscience. Or if anything on the unpractical side of ordinary. And thatyou will find is the case with "scientists" as a class all the worldover. What there is great of them is an annoyance to their fellowscientists and a mystery to the general public, and what is not isevident.

  There is no doubt about what is not great, no race of men have suchobvious littlenesses. They live in a narrow world so far as their humanintercourse goes; their researches involve infinite attention and analmost monastic seclusion; and what is left over is not very much. Towitness some queer, shy, misshapen, grey-headed, self-important, littlediscoverer of great discoveries, ridiculously adorned with the wideribbon of some order of chivalry and holding a reception of hisfellow-men, or to read the anguish of _Nature_ at the "neglect ofscience" when the angel of the birthday honours passes the Royal Societyby, or to listen to one indefatigable lichenologist commenting on thework of another indefatigable lichenologist, such things force one torealise the unfaltering littleness of men.

  And withal the reef of Science that these little "scientists" built andare yet building is so wonderful, so portentous, so full of mysterioushalf-shapen promises for the mighty future of man! They do not seem torealise the things they are doing! No doubt long ago even Mr.Bensington, when he chose this calling, when he consecrated his life tothe alkaloids and their kindred compounds, had some inkling of thevision,--more than an inkling. Without some such inspiration, for suchglories and positions only as a "scientist" may expect, what young manwould have given his life to such work, as young men do? No, they _must_have seen the glory, they must have had the vision, but so near that ithas blinded them. The splendour has blinded them, mercifully, so thatfor the rest of their lives they can hold the lights of knowledge incomfort--that we may see!

  And perhaps it accounts for Redwood's touch of preoccupation,that--there can be no doubt of it now--he among his fellows wasdifferent, he was different inasmuch as something of the vision stilllingered in his eyes.

  II.
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br />   The Food of the Gods I call it, this substance that Mr. Bensington andProfessor Redwood made between them; and having regard now to what ithas already done and all that it is certainly going to do, there issurely no exaggeration in the name. So I shall continue to call ittherefore throughout my story. But Mr. Bensington would no more havecalled it that in cold blood than he would have gone out from his flatin Sloane Street clad in regal scarlet and a wreath of laurel. Thephrase was a mere first cry of astonishment from him. He called it theFood of the Gods, in his enthusiasm and for an hour or so at the mostaltogether. After that he decided he was being absurd. When he firstthought of the thing he saw, as it were, a vista of enormouspossibilities--literally enormous possibilities; but upon this dazzlingvista, after one stare of amazement, he resolutely shut his eyes, evenas a conscientious "scientist" should. After that, the Food of the Godssounded blatant to the pitch of indecency. He was surprised he had usedthe expression. Yet for all that something of that clear-eyed momenthung about him and broke out ever and again....

  "Really, you know," he said, rubbing his hands together and laughingnervously, "it has more than a theoretical interest.

  "For example," he confided, bringing his face close to the Professor'sand dropping to an undertone, "it would perhaps, if suitably handled,_sell_....

  "Precisely," he said, walking away,--"as a Food. Or at least a foodingredient.

  "Assuming of course that it is palatable. A thing we cannot know till wehave prepared it."

  He turned upon the hearthrug, and studied the carefully designed slitsupon his cloth shoes.

  "Name?" he said, looking up in response to an inquiry. "For my part Iincline to the good old classical allusion. It--it makes Science res--.Gives it a touch of old-fashioned dignity. I have been thinking ... Idon't know if you will think it absurd of me.... A little fancy issurely occasionally permissible.... Herakleophorbia. Eh? The nutritionof a possible Hercules? You know it _might_ ...

  "Of course if you think _not_--"

  Redwood reflected with his eyes on the fire and made no objection.

  "You think it would do?"

  Redwood moved his head gravely.

  "It might be Titanophorbia, you know. Food of Titans.... You prefer theformer?

  "You're quite sure you don't think it a little _too_--"

  "No."

  "Ah! I'm glad."

  And so they called it Herakleophorbia throughout their investigations,and in their report,--the report that was never published, because ofthe unexpected developments that upset all their arrangements,--it isinvariably written in that way. There were three kindred substancesprepared before they hit on the one their speculations had foretolds andthese they spoke of as Herakleophorbia I, Herakleophorbia II, andHerakleophorbia III. It is Herakleophorbia IV. which I--insisting uponBensington's original name--call here the Food of the Gods.

  III.

  The idea was Mr. Bensington's. But as it was suggested to him by one ofProfessor Redwood's contributions to the Philosophical Transactions, hevery properly consulted that gentleman before he carried it further.Besides which it was, as a research, a physiological, quite as much as achemical inquiry.

  Professor Redwood was one of those scientific men who are addicted totracings and curves. You are familiar--if you are at all the sort ofreader I like--with the sort of scientific paper I mean. It is a paperyou cannot make head nor tail of, and at the end come five or six longfolded diagrams that open out and show peculiar zigzag tracings, flashesof lightning overdone, or sinuous inexplicable things called "smoothedcurves" set up on ordinates and rooting in abscissae--and things likethat. You puzzle over the thing for a long time and end with thesuspicion that not only do you not understand it but that the authordoes not understand it either. But really you know many of thesescientific people understand the meaning of their own papers quite well:it is simply a defect of expression that raises the obstacle between us.

  I am inclined to think that Redwood thought in tracings and curves. Andafter his monumental work upon Reaction Times (the unscientific readeris exhorted to stick to it for a little bit longer and everything willbe as clear as daylight) Redwood began to turn out smoothed curves andsphygmographeries upon Growth, and it was one of his papers upon Growththat really gave Mr. Bensington his idea.

  Redwood, you know, had been measuring growing things of all sorts,kittens, puppies, sunflowers, mushrooms, bean plants, and (until hiswife put a stop to it) his baby, and he showed that growth went out notat a regular pace, or, as he put it, so,

  / / / / / / / / / / /

  but with bursts and intermissions of this sort,

  _____ / / _____/ / / _____/ / / /

  and that apparently nothing grew regularly and steadily, and so far ashe could make out nothing could grow regularly and steadily: it was asif every living thing had just to accumulate force to grow, grew withvigour only for a time, and then had to wait for a space before it couldgo on growing again. And in the muffled and highly technical language ofthe really careful "scientist," Redwood suggested that the process ofgrowth probably demanded the presence of a considerable quantity of somenecessary substance in the blood that was only formed very slowly, andthat when this substance was used up by growth, it was only very slowlyreplaced, and that meanwhile the organism had to mark time. He comparedhis unknown substance to oil in machinery. A growing animal was ratherlike an engine, he suggested, that can move a certain distance and mustthen be oiled before it can run again. ("But why shouldn't one oil theengine from without?" said Mr. Bensington, when he read the paper.) Andall this, said Redwood, with the delightful nervous inconsecutiveness ofhis class, might very probably be found to throw a light upon themystery of certain of the ductless glands. As though they had anythingto do with it at all!

  In a subsequent communication Redwood went further. He gave a perfectBrock's benefit of diagrams--exactly like rocket trajectories they were;and the gist of it--so far as it had any gist--was that the blood ofpuppies and kittens and the sap of sunflowers and the juice of mushroomsin what he called the "growing phase" differed in the proportion ofcertain elements from their blood and sap on the days when they were notparticularly growing.

  And when Mr. Bensington, after holding the diagrams sideways and upsidedown, began to see what this difference was, a great amazement came uponhim. Because, you see, the difference might probably be due to thepresence of just the very substance he had recently been trying toisolate in his researches upon such alkaloids as are most stimulating tothe nervous system. He put down Redwood's paper on the patentreading-desk that swung inconveniently from his arm-chair, took off hisgold-rimmed spectacles, breathed on them and wiped them very carefully.

  "By Jove!" said Mr. Bensington.

  Then replacing his spectacles again he turned to the patentreading-desk, which immediately, as his elbow came against its arm, gavea coquettish squeak and deposited the paper, with all its diagrams in adispersed and crumpled state, on the floor. "By Jove!" said Mr.Bensington, straining his stomach over the arm-chair with a patientdisregard of the habits of this convenience, and then, finding thepamphlet still out of reach, he went down on all fours in pursuit. Itwas on the floor that the idea of calling it the Food of the Gods cameto him....

  For you see, if he was right and Redwood was right, then by injecting oradministering this new substance of his in food, he would do away withthe "resting phase," and instead of growth going on in this fashion,

  _____ / / _____/ / / _____/ / / /

  it would (if you follow me) go thus--

  / / / / / / / / / / /

  IV.

 
; The night after his conversation with Redwood Mr. Bensington couldscarcely sleep a wink. He did seem once to get into a sort of doze, butit was only for a moment, and then he dreamt he had dug a deep hole intothe earth and poured in tons and tons of the Food of the Gods, and theearth was swelling and swelling, and all the boundaries of the countrieswere bursting, and the Royal Geographical Society was all at work likeone great guild of tailors letting out the equator....

  That of course was a ridiculous dream, but it shows the state of mentalexcitement into which Mr. Bensington got and the real value he attachedto his idea, much better than any of the things he said or did when hewas awake and on his guard. Or I should not have mentioned it, becauseas a general rule I do not think it is at all interesting for people totell each other about their dreams.

  By a singular coincidence Redwood also had a dream that night, and hisdream was this:--

  | | | | | | | | | |

  It was a diagram done in fire upon a long scroll of the abyss. And he(Redwood) was standing on a planet before a sort of black platformlecturing about the new sort of growth that was now possible, to theMore than Royal Institution of Primordial Forces--forces which hadalways previously, even in the growth of races, empires, planetarysystems, and worlds, gone so:--

  _____ / _____/ / _____/ / /

  And even in some cases so:--