Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 9.pdf/238

 "You would."

I nibble a green blade.

"Do you realise quite," I ask, "that within a week we shall face our Utopian selves and measure something of what we might have been?"

The botanist's face clouds. He rolls over, sits up abruptly and puts his lean hands about his knees.

"I don't like to think about it," he says. "What is the good of reckoning might-have-beens?"

§ 5

It is pleasant to think of puzzling the organised wisdom of so superior a planet as this Utopia, this moral monster State my Frankenstein of reasoning has made, and to that pitch we have come. When we are next in the presence of our Lucerne official, he has the bearing of a man who faces a mystification beyond his powers, an incredible disarrangement of the order of Nature. Here, for the first time in the records of Utopian science, are two cases—not simply one but two, and these in each other's company!—of duplicated thumbmarks. This, coupled with a cock-and-bull story of an instantaneous transfer from some planet unknown to Utopian astronomy. That he and all his world exist only upon a hypothesis that would explain every one of these difficulties absolutely, is scarcely likely to occur to his obviously unphilosophic mind.

The official eye is more eloquent than the official lips and asks almost urgently, "What in this immeasurable universe have you managed to do to your