Death into Life

William Olaf Stapledon

Chapter 1 BATTLE

1. THE RAIDERS

TEN thousand boys in the upper air. Squadron upon squadron, their intricate machines thundered toward the target, heavy with death. Darkness below; and above, the stars. Below, the invisible carpet of the fields and little homes; above, and very far beyond those flashing stars, the invisible galaxies, gliding through the immense dark, squadron upon squadron of universes, deploying in the boundless and yet measured space.

In one of the bombers, seven boys. Seven young minds in patterned unity; each self-cherishing, but all knit inwardly together by fibres of steel-tempered comradeship. And all equally imprisoned, body and mind, in their intricate machinery.

Seven boys, and by strange chance a moth. It had strayed, no doubt, into the plane when the crew were taking their places. Since then it had wavered hither and thither, up and down its prison, from one domed transparent turret to another, teased by some obscure longing, needing though unwittingly a mate. Searching, softly colliding with now this young human cheek now that, kissing each one like the fluttered eyelash of an invisible beloved, it spent the numbered seconds of its life in vain. Or tremulously it thrust with feeble pressure against the prison windows, drawn by the pin-prick lights of the sky; but conceiving no immensity, no galaxies.

The seven boys too had their own, their more articulate yearnings. They craved the life that was normal to their human, and more conscious, but unfinished, nature. And like the moth sometimes their minds impotently fluttered at the prison windows, vainly questioning the stars.

2. THE REAR-GUNNER

The rear-gunner had never heard of galaxies. Even the stars were for him little more than drifting lights. He knew, of course, that they were suns; but what of it? The fact oppressed him. Shunned, it had sunk almost too deep for memory. And though, on nights like this he could not help remembering and wondering, after a moment's blankness he was bored. The stars, he felt, didn't help matters at all. Down here on earth it was hell, though streaked tantalizingly with unfulfilling joys, with sex and beer and the bitter shattering ecstasy of air-fighting. There were moments, too, rather frightening but somehow exalting, when something deep inside one seemed to take possession, so that the whole of life changed its colour and became terribly important, and one kicked oneself for being such a waster. But they didn't last, those moments. They were probably due to digestion, or glands or something. No, down here it was hell; and up there, just those blank stars. And now, to make things worse, he was starting a cold in his nose. Already it tickled and exasperated him, and already his head was none too clear. Would it spoil his nerve? Would he muff his part in the show? Whatever happened, he must not let the crew down. That really mattered. Mattered? Why 'mattered'? For a moment an abyss of emptiness opened before him, but he gallantly leapt it. Hell! He didn't know why it 'mattered', but it did; it mattered terribly that the crew should do well. Then, remembering an earlier raid, when the air round the plane was all fire and hammer-blows of blast, he felt an inner sinking. Of course the odds were that the whole seven of them would come through safely. But some crews would not. And sooner or later—He pictured the plane ablaze.

Panic swooped on him; but instantly he beat it off. One mustn't think such thoughts. Think rather of the pilot's skill and his own gunnery. Oh well! Quite soon they would be racing home in front of the dawn, lightened of bombs, and of fear. Then breakfast. How he wanted to live! The moth's careless kiss had stirred him strangely, like the tickle of a girl's hair on one's cheek, he thought. He had never been to bed with a girl yet, though he often pretended he had. And he might die tonight, never having done it. Why, he asked himself, was he so clumsy with girls? Perhaps he was really frightened of them, frightened of damaging something holy in them. He could never rid himself of that feeling, though he knew it was silly. They were just female animals, and he a male one. And so he covered his reverent shyness with a man-of-the-world swagger; but they saw through it. She saw through it. And she could lead him on and put him off so easily, the teasing little bitch. But oh God, perhaps—perhaps they were both messing things up; perhaps there really was something sacred; perhaps this business of loving was really the way to it, if only they had the right technique. By now the bomber was over the narrow sea. The risen moon's reflection was a splash of light ahead. The moth pressed more urgently toward the increased luminosity, while far below, unseen, each wave-crest, each droplet of spray and bubble of foam, was transfused with moonlight.

The rear-gunner did not know that under this salt water was an ancient valley. There, forests had grown beside a great river. Mammoths had crushed their way through the brushwood, and swum the hurrying water, seeking new pastures in the future island. Crouching submen had used untrimmed stones for tools, and for weapons in' their subhuman quarrels, preluding bombs. But to the rear-gunner the narrow sea was only the protecting moat of his island country. And his country was- just fields and houses, cities and mines, the King and the Princesses, and so on. And of course the decentest people in the world; and the motherland of an Empire which was a spreading decency in every continent. Some said it wasn't, blast them! They ought to know better than to foul their own nest. But even if they were right, and the Empire was a huge fraud, what matter? It was only the people at home that really mattered. It was for them the crews were fighting, and for the whole decent way of life. Decent? What could that really mean? Sacred? Right absolutely? Or just the done thing, just a groundless habit?

Dark land now loomed beyond the moonlit sea. Soon they would be up against the enemy's defences, and then there must be no more dreaming. Thank God, though he was clumsy with a girl, he was quick and sure with a gun; and though on the way to the target his belly melted and his legs might sometimes quiver, he was cool enough when the show began. How the seven of them would act as one living thing, keying their functions perfectly together! But oh, he wanted to live on. Of course those buggers must be stopped from smashing everything. And the island fortress must be defended, and the Empire, and all that. Yes, and though one longed like hell for Civvy Street, it was good to know that one was in on the greatest show, and doing it with style, like the 'few', the superb 'few', in the Battle of Britain. But oh, he wanted to live.

Well, if he did live through to the peace, he wouldn't bother about politics. He'd have the hell of a good time to make up for all this. Suddenly he had a vision of himself with his medals and his wing on a shabby civilian coat, selling tooth-brushes from door to door. That sort of thing happened after the last war, but it shouldn't happen to him! If they didn't give him something better than that, he and his kind would smash everything. The country certainly needed cleaning up. It was all the fault of those dirty Jews, no doubt. Well, if life meant living as an 'ex-serviceman', far better die tonight, and have done. But pain! Like when he burned his hand, but all over. And death? One never spoke about these things. He didn't even whisper about them to his secret self, not if he could help it. Tonight, somehow, he didn't care. He must face the facts. It was so much easier for the Germans and the Japs, who believed they were going to Valhalla or something. But for us, it was different. Of course the Padre was sure we were all bound for some kind of heaven or other. At least he said he was, but that was what he was paid for. Risky to bet on it, anyhow. But if death was just a snuffing out, a switching off the current, what sense in all this, this mess of heaven and hell down here?

Once more the rear-gunner brooded on the wide pin-pricked dome. Those stars, those suns, were all looking at him with a cold objective stare; or blinking, the better to see him; the better to eat you up, my dear. At last he knew them for what they really were, the devils. So at least he half-persuaded himself.

Actually, of course, they ignored him as completely as he ignored any little phagocyte in his own blood-stream. The stars flowed in their thousands, their myriads, squadron upon squadron, phagocytes in the blood-stream of our galaxy. Depth behind depth behind depth, they streamed along the channels of space, the great stars and the small, the near and the far, the young giants and the senile dwarfs. And what their significance might be, neither the rear-gunner nor any earth-bound intelligence could ever know. Yet in the rear-gunner's mind some dark, threatening hint of their possible meaning bore heavily down. He shivered and blew his nose. Christ! What sense was there in those bloody great fires? Those flying sparks, perhaps, from some unseen, far greater fire. What a thought! He must pull himself together. For him the flares, the flak, the tracer, must have more meaning; and to keep a sharp eye and a steady hand. For at any moment now enemy fighters might appear, and still far ahead lay the target, the City.

3. THE CITY AND ITS PEOPLE

Far ahead the City lay in the moonlight, exposed, waiting. The sirens had sounded. Seen from the air by its patrolling fliers, this metropolis was a huge smear, spilt on the patterned carpet of forest and lakes, rivers and gossamer roads. It was an amorphous, yet an obscurely detailed patch, as of lichen or some fungoid growth. It sprawled over the plain, vaguely organic, splayed, a squashed animal on the tarmac. But it was not lifeless. Restless antennae of light reached upward from it, sweeping the sky, probing the upper air, fading before the starry depth. For they searched, those prying feelers, not for any heaven but for the expected re-onset of hell.

In a nearer view the City, the great living, wounded creature, still displayed areas of vitality, intact tissues of patterned streets and roofs. But there were huge tracts also of roofless honeycomb, the cell-lids sheared away, leaving frail, broken, wax-thin walls, the honey spilt and lost, the grubs all killed. There were broad regions, too, where the comb had been crushed and flattened, the fragile tenements shattered down into formless rubble.

Within this hive, this ants' nest, trampled and churned by giant footfall, insects were still alive. Though swarms of them had migrated outward into the forest and the frost to escape the nocturnal terror, many remained. Ousters were gathered in deep-lying crannies and into the buttressed shelters. Old people, their spirits already frayed out toward death, clung still to life's last threads. Mothers clung to their babies, fiercely jealous lest death part them; and expectant mothers dreaded lest convulsive terror should drive the womb to vomit out too soon its unfinished treasure. Young men and women shared without privacy intimate delight, lest death should forestall them. But others of the city's swarm had taken their stations for defence against Hell's repeated impact. Gunners on their gun-sites waited. Fire-watchers on the roofs waited. Wardens were in the streets. Ambulance drivers were ready with their cars. In the casualty clearing stations doctors and nurses waited in tense idleness. In the mortuaries there were still displayed the unclaimed relics of the city's previous agony, old withered bodies, and bodies in shattered bloom, bodies in rags that were recently fine clothing, and bodies in rags long worn; and tom disjected members, strangely impersonal, that were once the familiar limbs of living workers, housewives, children.

Hidden among the ruins, armed men in uniform were held in leash, ready to discipline the population.

City of horror, tortured no less in spirit than in flesh. Like any city, it was a swarm of anxious little solipsistic individuals, each encased in its own world, which seemed to it the one and only, the true, the great world. For each of these beings, these postmen, charwomen, shopkeepers, company directors, carried about with it, as an aquatic insect might carry down a breathable air-bubble, its own particular little universe, a microscopic and fragmentary excerpt from the immense real; and yet a universe, a microcosm, complete with landscapes and sentient beings, with cities and a starry sky, whether of pin-pricks merely or giant suns; complete, too, with its own flux of time, whether of a lifetime's years only, or of historical centuries, or stellar æons. Within each universe the minute individual himself presided as a percipient, dynamic, scheming centre, endowing its peculiar bubble with fragrance and colour, with heats of desire and deadly chills of desolation. And these little selves, these body-minds, these vibrant instruments of passion and of will, insulated as mid-ocean islets, yet most strangely members one of another—might it be that these were fractional excerpts from one immensity, from one ultimate and single awareness? Or were they and all their kind throughout the cosmos utterly separate grains of consciousness, and the sole order of mentality in all the universe? Or did personal deity look down on them, sifting his myriad creatures like sand-grains between his fingers. Or were the little selves not in fact enduring spiritual substances at all, but merely evanescent wraiths of sentience and desire steaming from the physical processes of human bodies, like vapours from a dung-heap?

Viewed in the mass, as units in a city's or a world's population, or as insects in an ants' nest, how indistinguishable they were; their prized differences merely the infinitesimal irregularities of a machined pattern. Yet in a closer, a more intimate view, how unique each one! Here, a little universe predominantly sunlit; until the common disaster of our times eclipsed the sun for all. There, a microcosm of sheer desolation. Here, a cauldron of furious events; there, a stagnant puddle. Here, a mean and shrunken universe, confined within a network of commercial or political intrigue, or of contrived occasions of self-display; there, an ample and ever-expanding microcosm, mirroring, however imperfectly, the whole tumult of our modern world, the sequence of human history, the dawn of man, and of the cosmos. Here, and here, and here, a universe disjointed by foolish dreams or crazy myths. But there, and there, a very simple microcosm, devoid of all immensities and subtleties, yet (who knows?) perhaps essentially true to the ultimate temper of reality, because lit inwardly by a few bright comradeships and loves.

And the little sentient, dynamic centres themselves, how diverse! This, a spider, spreading, day in, day out, its filaments to bind the wings of the innocent; that, a warm fountain of light irradiating neighbour universes. This, living by rote, unquesting as a sleep-walker; that, with fibres of martyred nerve extending into every cranny of its little world.

So diversified were the city's millions in individual temper; and yet, under the stress of a common delusion, a common tyranny, a common tragedy, all now were harshly likened by the impress of an iron convention.

Crippled now, the city, but unflinchingly game; with the fury of the cornered rat, the tiger at bay. Proud and loyal people; but now bewildered, tragic. Their idols crumbling. Gentle at heart, most biddable. Delighting in the family and the Christmas tree; in the pregnant tome, the far-flung theory. Opening the heavens with their music. A people consciously how civilized; but latently barbarian; like all men, but perhaps more dangerously. Under all their subtlety, too simple. Under their gentleness, teased by the itch of their own brutality; like all men, though perhaps more fiercely. A people easily enslaved to brutish gods; the more so, since a nobler God had failed them. For now the old gentle faith of the West lay rotting in their hearts. Some, no doubt, still cherished it, were martyred for it, witnessing against the tyranny; yet for most it was dead. How faithfully had this people obeyed their new prophet, their frenzied medicine-man. Giving him their boys and girls to remake to his dream. Burning the books. Impounding, killing, torturing, to make a unified people. Swarming over the frontiers in the prophet's name to make a unified world. Demented with visions, they had strained forward towards the promised land, the valhalla of glory and world-mastery and plenty, these self-chosen saviours of mankind. But mankind had refused them, had banded against them. And now their vision was fading. Not merely because their armies were driven back, their cities blasted; in their own hearts a spirit long dormant stirred in revolt against the prophet and his purpose. Was it perhaps because, month after month, year after year, the eyes of their victims and slaves had stabbed them? Impotent pin-pricks, merely, but infinitely reiterated. Or was it that their own suffering was at last teaching them gentleness?

Unhappy, tragic people. Deep sunk in guilt; but scapegoats also of a guilty world.

4. THE ATTACK

The straining ears of the city's defenders were touched by a shadow of sound. Sound was it, or fancy? If sound, was it thunder, or the reverberation of distant battle? Advancing waves from the remote tumult vibrated through the city's foundations, and slid along the air-ways of the streets. The ruins trembled. The whole great wounded creature quivered in every cell. And where the sound travelled, there travelled also throughout the city's population, among the watchers at their posts and the crowds gathered in the shelters, a sigh, concealed by each from each.

Suddenly the city's own guns shouted and raged. Windows rattled, crockery jangled. The sky's pin-prick stars were outshone by short-lived brilliants. Ten thousand boys were in the upper air, intent on slaughter; fair game, these, for the guns. And now the downpour of great bombs tortured the city's heart, each striking into street or building, with fierce rebound of fire; all intermingling their spreading blast as raindrops their rings on a tormented pool. And so, in half an hour, one more tract of the city's honeycomb was obliterated, as by giant footfall. Once more, homes were disembowelled, or their fronts tom off, exposing the doll's-house rooms and furniture. Factories, offices, schools, churches, became instantly mere rubble. And in these conglomerates of concrete and brick, of beams and girders, here and there were human bodies. Of these, many were quiet, their breath and life crushed out of them; but some still breathed, and cried. And now great fires were jubilant parasites upon the city, reaching their bright limbs skyward, their dark plumes above the bombers.

In those minutes, hundreds upon hundreds of the little personal universes vanished like the bubbles of a drying foam. Their vital centres annihilated, they were extinguished, as a lit room ceases when the lamp is shattered. And of the survivors some, because they were symbiotic with some slaughtered one, were themselves henceforth mutilated almost to death.

The city's bright antennae swept and probed the sky. In the upper air the bombers picked their courses among cloud-high waving stems of enemy light and bursting blossoms of fire. The ten thousand were performing their appointed duty. For them the city's heart was a target to be obliterated with finished skill before breakfast. That it was also a tissue of lives and loves, was by most, in the stress of the attack, forgotten. But for some it was obtrusive, and to be anxiously shunned; and by a few the stab of pity was turned aside by a carapace of self-righteousness; while fewer still, misshapen minds, secretly relished the vicarious agony. But the more lucid gravely faced the horror that they were inflicting, as one may press the core out of a boil; and in full awareness they carried on with the work.

Each crew was a steel-knit unity of special functions and diverse mentalities, obedient to a common purpose. Though each boy in each crew was indeed his own cherished self, with a private theme of life recalcitrant to this dread night, yet each was self-yieldingly organic to the crew. Here and there, maybe, some misfit in the mental pattern, some lone outsider or some untamed spirit, marred the crew's unity; flustering all with mutual doubt and self-tender fear, poisoning the composite being's single-heartedness and proficiency; much as an aching tooth, or any other thorn in the flesh, may loosen an athlete's unity of eye and muscle.

But this discordancy was rare. Each crew, within the little universe of its common lethal purpose, was an integral creature. And the whole armada of aircraft, stooping squadron by squadron to the target, projecting their deadly spawn into the city's heart with stop-watch precision and overwhelming concentration of onset, moved as a single creature, an organic and intelligent swarm of beings, self-tender, but self-yielding to the common life, the common purpose.

Not inviolate the bombers. Now one and now others, found by the city's antennae, caught by the city's guns or by airborne defenders, streaked the darkness with a long downward curve of flame; or blazed as a sudden eruption, then vanished.

The moth still vacillated up and down its flying prison, vaguely dissatisfied. But for the seven, the climax of their journey was now at hand, the releasing of their death-load. Rapt now in the urgency of their task, they were seven organs of one mechanical winged creature. If any thoughts from the world of individual living should flutter into any of the seven minds, these must be instantly destroyed. The composite life of the crew must be absolute. The moth only, unwilling and uncomprehending passenger, was separate. Imprisoned physically, it remained mentally unfettered to the human tyranny, through its very obtuseness.

The rear-gunner was happy. Already he had killed, and now he waited for the next attacker. But when again the moth touched him with the magic of a remote though so familiar world, his heart tripped; then instantly recovered. Fiercely he braced himself.

Suddenly the plane was caught by convergent fingers of light. Near shell-bursts blasted it hither and thither. In the storm of jagged illumination, the rear-gunner saw for a moment the moth, a tremulous creamy flake pinned on darkness.

Then overwhelmingly the rear-gunner's universe became all brilliance and crashing noise: Wild pain flooded him through every nerve. Every cell of his body's surface was attacked by smashing blast and furious heat. And so with all the seven. The moth's papery tissues instantly became a whiff of disorganized molecules. The flesh of all the seven boys was agonizingly disintegrated. Seven young brains, the centres and king-pins of seven universes, received their last experience. Then these too became mere whiffs of gas, a rabble of wandering molecules.

And the seven young selves?

The rear-gunner's ultimate moments were wholly occupied with pain, the frantic revulsion of his members against destruction. All other experienced things in his universe, the pin-prick stars that were suns, the crew's sacred comradeship, the moth's kiss, and all his nineteen years of growing, were obliterated in the white heat of his body's agony. Then pain itself ceased. The rear-gunner was annihilated.

5. FIRST INTERLUDE: WHAT IS THIS DYING?

In the tube we said good-bye. You on the platform, I in the train. In the time of the rockets.

Smiling, you stepped back and blew me a kiss. It was bright with all our past.

The doors slid to, dividing us.

The chance that we should not meet any more was only, I told myself, one in many millions. And yet—that very morning, and only a few streets away, scores of people had been killed. Today, as on a thousand days, they had yawned themselves out of bed, dressed, breakfasted, set off about their business,' then suddenly, or slowly and miserably, they had stopped being. Or so it seems.

What is this dying? No one who has done it can tell us what it is like.

Are we mere sparks of sentience that death extinguishes, or fledgeling immortals who fear to leave the nest? Or both, or neither?

We are conceived in mystery, and into mystery we die.

Let us, at least, not clamour for immortality, not pledge our hearts to it. If the end is sleep, well, when we are tired, sleep is the final bliss.

And yet perhaps what dies is only the dear trivial familiar self of each. Perhaps in our annihilation some vital and eternal thing does break wing, fly free. We cannot know.

But this we know: whether we are annihilated or attain in some strange way eternal life, to have loved is good.

Chapter 2 EPHEMERAL SPIRITS

1. THE INSTANT OF DEATH

AT the very point of his annihilation the rear-gunner suffered a strange experience, and one not easily to be told. He had already swooned free from pain, and was falling headlong into nothingness. In that final instant, suddenly he woke into awareness of his whole past life. His whole past universe flashed miraculously upon him in exquisite early-morning clearness and manifold detail. Once more and all at once he was aware of all his days and nights, but as a string of variegated beads laid out before him, alternate light and dark. Each was figured with the unique experiences of that particular dated night or day. There, as though present, he saw the day when he had first been taken to school; the night of an indescribable nightmare which kept its teeth in him even for many nights and days; the day when, a school-boy, he had glimpsed divinity in a schoolgirl; the day when he had started work in a bank; the night of his first operational flight across the narrow sea. He saw too that the string holding all his days and nights together was his cherished and continuously growing body, now in the instant of destruction. Then, it lived, and was the vehicle of all memory, the medium of all passions and ecstasies, the source of all teasing hungers and all satisfaction. But now his flesh was in the very act of death, his mind in the instant of annihilation. Strange, strange that a mere instant should have room for crowding thoughts and desires, and contain within itself all his nineteen years!

At one end of the long sequence of his days he saw his first day of all, knotted into the peaceful darkness of the womb, a day of painful and novel churning and pressing, and of an agony of constriction, followed by the sting of cool air on tender skin, and a sudden smack that roused his lungs to their first breath and outcry. In the stress of this earliest and most deeply buried of his memories the rear-gunner was swept again by floods of blind infantile terror, rage and self-pity; and of yearning for the womb's peace. And yet, surveying his first day from the miraculous viewpoint of his last instant, he no longer desired the womb, which seemed now about to swallow him once more, and for ever. Now, all his desire was for life, and the fulfilment of life's frustrated promises. For there before him lay all his days, frustrated; bright with hopes and partial satisfactions, but scored over with countless boredoms, distresses, falsified intimations of future bliss, Greedily he licked up all the sweetness of his precious numbered days, and spat out all their bitterness. And with self-pity he brooded on the mature manhood that he was never to taste.

But now, in this same miraculously pregnant instant at the point of his annihilation, the rear-gunner became aware of a strange conflict within himself. With his whole being, seemingly, he was protesting against annihilation; and yet at the same time he in some deep way accepted annihilation with equanimity. With his whole being, seemingly, he clung greedily to every sweet thing in his lifetime; and yet also he turned away impatiently in search of ulterior ends, It was almost as though two selves of contrary tempers assessed each day and minute of his life, The one was recognizably himself as he had always been, an eager lapper-up of pleasures and spewer-out of pains. The other, the frightening and inhuman intruder, that was so alien and yet somehow more deeply himself than his familiar self could ever be, lapped up nothing, spewed nothing out, This formerly submerged but now active part of him, if such it could be accounted, accepted pleasures and pains alike dispassionately, judging each one for some ulterior significance, inquiring of each whether the issue had in fact been life or death, an increased range and penetration of personal being, or a mere crippling. Thus in assessing the occasion when he had shockingly burnt his hand the rear-gunner was twi-minded about it. As his normal self, he was transfixed by the memory of the pain; but in the other mode of his being, though equally aware of the body's distress, he surveyed it quietly, and with a sort of voiceless laughter at the other's gross enslavement. For this, after all, had been not a crippling but an enlarging, an illuminating, experience. Had it not initiated him into the formidable mystery of suffering? And how could one begin to be a man without such initiation?

But his normal self greeted this incursion of a superior mentality with incomprehension, ridicule and hate. He protested to himself, 'If I must die, I'll die honest to God as I really am, and not be a sham padre or a highbrow. Pain is just hell. I see no good in it, I hate it, I loathe it. To hell with it!'

In his final instant, the rear-gunner tasted again the thousand little experiences of wounded vanity or social mortification that had moth-eaten the fair textile of his life, as when he had been cold-shouldered by the belle of his suburb, or when he had discovered that a new and brilliant friend lived in a shabby street. But now he was torn by the violent discord between his familiar and his more lucid selves. The one surrendered abjectly to the long-past horror of social embarrassment; the other was tortured by shame of a very different order, shame at puerility and meanness. In particular, over the friend's back-street home he was now thrown into an agony of self-contempt. For the friendship, which, as he now saw, might have been a quickening influence in his life, had been poisoned by his snobbery. In that first act of withdrawal, and in many other betrayals, up and down his life, he had given poison to his own soul, so that he became each time a little blinder, a little more heartless.

Assessing his blundering approach to the girl whom he had recently designed to possess, he saw now in his awakened mood that never once had he come face to face with her as a living spirit. Neither of them had any real perception either of themselves or of one another or of their relationship. Each had again and again wounded the other, not by cruelty but by sheer self-absorption and obtuseness. On an occasion when she, in distress over a crushed butterfly, had looked to him for sympathy, he had failed to conceive that her misery might have some hidden source. Secretly contemptuous of her childishness, he had petted her and made love to her. But though she clung to him, a strange chill came over her. And presently he grew exasperated at her unresponsiveness, and ridiculed her for grieving so much over a trifle. Then unaccountably she was seized with violent weeping. The rear-gunner in his last instant and his miraculous lucidity saw, what neither of them had at the time recognized, that through the butterfly's destruction she had glimpsed with lightning suddenness the horror in which countless fighting men and whole populations of the oppressed were at that I moment engulfed. She was flung into a desperate conflict between compassion for the oppressed and a new sense that to participate in slaughter, even for the rescue of the tormented peoples, was hideous sacrilege; though a sacrilege which in a sick world needs must be perpetrated, to avoid a sacrilege more hideous. But all this happened upon a plane of her being which she had never before entered. Bewildered and terrified, she fled from it into mere pity for the butterfly. But vague perplexity and unreasonable terror remained. And in coming to him as an unhappy child rather than as a woman, and in confiding to him a seemingly trivial grief that tapped deeper sorrows, she was calling out to him for more than the familiar love-making; she was imploring him for understanding and for the healing of a wound which she herself dared not scrutinize; in fact she asked for love, for the mutual searching and cherishing of beings diverse in temper, yet members of one another. All this the awakened self of the rear-gunner now recognized. And bitterly he despised himself for his past obtuseness.

Yet in the very act of self-contempt, he also, as his normal self, resented and feared this intrusion of clearer insight. 'What on earth', he demanded, 'has come over me? What's the matter with me? Where does all this highbrow slush come from? Not from me, surely. I'm not like that; I never was. And anyhow, what's a girl for? Damn it, it wasn't up to me to get her out of her silly muddle. All that sob-stuff over an insect!'

In this matter of violence the new self of the rear-gunner revolted with peculiar horror from his normal self. The living boy had always accepted, though with obscure disquiet, the necessity of using violence to defend the right. He himself had been called to kill and to share in killing. For the crew's sake and for his country's sake he had played his part in slaughter, sealing off in a neglected corner of his mind all realization of the actuality, and of the horror and shame that it engendered. He had told himself, 'It's dirty work, but it has got to be done. If we're damned for doing it, well we're damned, but it has got to be done.'

His new self, however, was outraged and bitterly remorseful. His quickened imagination revealed with grim faithfulness the agony of the enemy airman smashed by machine-gun bullets or cannon-shell, and of the enemy citizens shattered or buried or burnt by the crew's bombing. But more shameful even than this horror itself was the spiritual betrayal that made it possible, the betrayal of that which his new perception revealed as the most sacred thing, the bond of brotherhood between all personal beings. New thoughts welled up in him, thoughts which he could only with difficulty express, since his language was limited by the dead boy's crude speech. Searching beyond the range of the rear-gunner's familiar jargon, he brought out from the forgotten recesses of that mind words and phrases dusty with neglect. 'How could I be so—so insensitive,' he questioned, 'so—coarse-grained, dull-witted, brutish, and so cowardly, as to take part in all that savagery, that wickedness! And how can I ever wipe out, expiate, that sin? I have wakened to find myself up to the neck in filth at the bottom of a deep and stinking pit from which I can never climb.'

But presently his mood changed. Lifted as it were outside himself, he regarded more objectively not only his participation in murder but his whole life of rudderless drifting.

Reverting to the old jargon, 'Poor mut, poor twerp!' he sighed. Then, painfully seeking out words that could express more faithfully his new quickened perception, 'That poor sleep-walker', he said, 'could not possibly have done otherwise. How could so insensitive a being have struck free from the universal sin? How could anyone so scared of disapproval, so cowed by the tribe's censure, have seen that the tribe was wrong, have stood out against the tribe's will? The most that could be expected of him was that he should obey the tribal call to give up his freedom and learn to fight and in the end to die. And this he did.'

But now another thought slowly took shape under the anxious scrutiny of the rear-gunner's newly awakened and more lucid self. Surveying all his fragmentary and hitherto undigested, uncriticized acquaintance with the world of men, he saw that even if he had been clearly conscious of the enormity of slaughter, yet to stand aside would have been wrong. For to stand aside would have been to refuse a desperate call for rescue. Millions of human beings, suffering under the most hideous tyranny, cried out for practical help, and there was no way of bringing them relief save the forlorn attempt of war. To preach human brotherhood and set an example of non-violence would in this case be quite futile. Moreover so deep-seated and subtle was the perversion of all men's minds, so crazily were most men addicted to false values, and so desperate was the present plight of the human race, that nothing but violence, nothing but ruthless slaughter, could prevent the destruction of the very possibility of a better world.

'If I had stood aside', he admitted, 'I should have been a peculiarly ugly kind of snob, I should have been guilty of a sort of snobbery of righteousness. I should have been just washing my hands of the whole mess to keep my precious self clean.'

Yet when he remembered stories he had heard of the selfless devotion of some who refused to take any part in war, he wondered whether they had perhaps some vision that he still lacked, so confident were they that violence must always in the long run inevitably do more harm than good.

But presently he told himself, 'Those visionaries may, just may, be right; and certainly they were true to their own faith. But—how can one refuse for a doubtful vision a present and urgent cry for help against cruel oppressors, torturers?'

Bewilderment and horror weighed down on him. 'Surely', he cried, 'the world must be sheer hell if the only hope is that millions, in order to rescue the tortured, will force themselves to use all the devilish devices of war, will freely commit this foul crime against—against what? Call it the spirit. This crime against the spirit, against the very thing that they want to defend. Yes, surely this world of ours is sheer hell.'

But recalling the brighter and fairer things in his own short life, he protested, 'No, not hell, but something lovely that has been spoilt, something of lovely promise but terribly hurt, frustrated. Where was it, and when, and in what form that the poison entered?' These questions were beyond his wit to answer; for his knowledge of the world was but the knowledge of an average young man; and, though his intelligence had been quickened by death, ignorance defeated it.

When the rear-gunner's two selves, if two they were, and if truly 'selves', and if both were indeed 'his', reviewed his final instant of agony and annihilation, their feelings were very different. The normal boy, faced with utter destruction, cried out, seemingly with the whole force of his being, 'Oh, Christ, let me live!' And with that last desperate prayer the rear-gunner himself, the normal, greedy, snobbish, fear-tortured, yet within the crew well-disciplined and comradely, self of the rear-gunner utterly ceased to be. Surely the outcry of that poor self-cherishing and doomed individual mind might well have echoed from star to star, from galaxy to galaxy, might have reached even to the ears of compassionate God, if such there be; with the similar last cries of his six companions and the other slaughtered crews and the many killed citizens in their fiery honeycomb, and all the killed on land and sea and in the air, in every quarter of the planet.

But the other, alien self of the rear-gunner, and the alien self in all the company of the killed, scorned that prayer which all had prayed. 'Not I,' affirmed the rear-gunner in his more lucid mode, or the alien being that had awakened in the rear-gunner's annihilation, 'Surely not I, but some other, was guilty of that cry, some mere brute, some subhuman thing involved with me.'

Thus in his last instant the rear-gunner, like all the killed, had been torn by inner conflict. The normal boy, at the very point of extinction, was outraged by the aloofness and ulterior searching of that stranger within himself. He supposed that the coldness of desire in him must surely be death itself already dissolving his vitality and disintegrating his mind. Yet in the same instant he, his very self (if his self it truly was), his new, alien and quickened self, assessing his past life's little worth, declared, 'All my life I shirked the test. I took the easy line. I lapped up little pleasures and was cowed by little pains. I turned away from every opportunity of growth, held back always by sluggishness or fear or blank obtuseness, smothering the dim light in me at every step by my self-generated fog of trivial cravings. What might I have done, what become, if I had not chosen always to remain a sleep-walker. And now it is too late. Never will those lost openings be restored to me.' Remorse and self-despising gripped him. Particularly he loathed his baser self for that final desperate cry to a divinity in whom he had never really believed, and whose name had hitherto been for him little more than an imprecation. 'Abject creature that I am,' he said, 'nailed to self-pity! What matter that such a moth must die without fulfilment?'

Not that even in his more lucid mentality the rear-gunner accepted annihilation wholly without misgiving. Though he cared nothing for his personal survival, yet it seemed that with his ending must also come an end to something perhaps more worthy. Seemingly the whole little treasure of experience which he had gathered in his brief lifetime must now, with his extinction, be itself extinguished. If only he could know that in some way it contributed to some whole of cosmical or divine experience, as a raindrop to the ocean! But he had no reason to believe that this was so; and in his lucid mode he scorned to believe without reason, merely for comfort. Well, the ocean would not be perceptibly the poorer without his raindrop. Moreover, as he now bitterly realized, he had lived so obtusely that perhaps nothing whatever in his whole life was creatively unique and worthy of preservation. True, but what of his six companions, and the thousands of war dead and all the myriads that had died and were to die in all lands and ages? And what of all those stars that were indeed suns, and the minded worlds that perhaps were sprinkled, however sparsely, up and down the galaxies? Did all their vast treasure of experience simply vanish with the ephemeral individuals who had supported it?

The rear-gunner, even in his more lucid self, was oppressed by the seeming futility of all existence. But he told himself that even the loss of all that treasure mattered nothing. Really what mattered was just that the upshot of all those myriad lives should be the practical advancement of their particular worlds in individual happiness. But happiness? The happiness of insects like himself? Not sheer happiness, then, but the fulfilling of these insects in ever richer, keener, more discriminate, more creative living. (What unfamiliar language this! From what hidden source did it rise up in him?) The fulfilling of insects, generation after generation, in ever finer awareness! Then, was the justification of the æons of misery and pain some final, glorious, cosmical Utopia? And would it be a dreadfully superior Utopia of super-minds intent on super-highbrow activities? Once more oppression seized the rear-gunner. And presently he thought of the inevitable decline and fall of that far-off society. For scientists declared that the whole universe was running down like a clock, and that in the end all life would be extinguished. In imagination he saw a million frozen worlds, each sprinkled with frozen honeycombs that once were cities, their features now almost obliterated by the corpse coverlet of ultimate snow.

The rear-gunner, or that which had awakened in the rear-gunner's final instant, was overwhelmed by a great weariness and loneliness, so that he cared only for sleep. Vaguely he thought of those occasions when, after a hard day, he had dropped into bed, and down, down, into the peace of sleep. (The womb again.) On those nights, had he on the brink been told that, if he slept now, he would never wake again, he would have leapt from his bed; but now, though believing that his sleep was to be eternal, he sighed thankfully and drew the blanket of oblivion over his head. Presently even the ultimate desire for extinction was expunged from him; and with it, all thinking, all awareness.

2. ANNIHILATION AND SURVIVAL

After an instant or an æon, he who had been the rear-gunner in the aeroplane where the moth was imprisoned woke from his nescience. And it was as though he woke into a new nature.

He took up once more the thread of his meditation, but now the whole climate of his being had changed, as though sleep had profoundly refreshed him. He smiled at his recent despond, reminding himself of the feebleness of human intellect. How should human animals, those upright worms with swelled heads, predict the issue of the æons? And if the last event must indeed be ultimate and eternal death, might not all still be well? After full achievement, what better than sleep? But anyhow, what matter! How foolish to despair over a disaster so remote and so uncertain!

Once more, he considered the chequered rosary of his own past days and nights. Little enough of achievement, certainly, could be seen in them. But he viewed them now no longer with a sense of personal frustration, no longer with exasperation and self-blame. Somehow a weight seemed to have fallen from him, as though an aeroplane had jettisoned its load, and suddenly flown free. Pitifully, but not with self-pity, he now fingered the little rosary of those days and nights. 'Poor boy,' he said, 'so greedy was he for delight, and so misused by the world, and by himself. So unaware was he of all but his trivial hungers and pains. No! Not I! That poor sleep-walker was never I.'

And yet, fingering again those beads of time, and looking more closely into the heart of each obscurely translucent globe, he began to see that there were indeed occasions in the rear-gunner's life of which he could without hesitation declare, 'Now that, yes that, truly was I. Then, and then, and then, I, the real I, did indeed wake in the depth of the dreamer's heart; and I, I, took possession for a while.'

He watched the schoolboy, startled once by seeing with new eyes a certain outlawed schoolmate, so that with fists and tongue and heart he hotly championed him. And when he had so thrillingly greeted divinity in a schoolgirl, his adoration, though callow and muddied with self-importance, was in essence disinterested. Responding to that alien sweetness he had indeed in his childish way saluted divinity. That adoration of another, that craving to live wholly for another's sake, that obscure longing to find with another some still inconceivable but exquisite union and rebirth as 'we'! There had been moments, too, when trees and flowers and clouds had opened strange windows for him. And sometimes, in his training for the air, most unexpectedly, a mathematical formula had stirred him with its economy and far range of significance. Music, too, had now and again struck from him a spark of perplexed worship. And after all, had he not given himself without reserve to the crew's life, in service of a cause how vaguely conceived yet none the less recognized as binding? For that cause he, who feared death as a child the dark, had died.

'Yes!' affirmed the being who had awakened out of the rear-gunner, 'on those occasions it was indeed I, my very self, who saw, felt, spoke, took action.' And as he peered into the dimly luminous heart of each past day, he recognized everywhere traces of a lucidity which he need not disown, though everywhere it was overlayed with the poor sleep-walker's obtuseness. 'Though he was not I,' he mused, 'yet every day and every night I was astir within him, though drowsily, in the dark womb of his nature.'

'But I?' he wondered, 'Who am I? What is it that I truly am? The creature that gave birth to me, the creature that cried out for immortality, is quite extinguished. It has no part in my future; whilst I, escaping from its death, am cut off from all nourishment from its finished life. And yet I live on. The cord is cut, but the first breath in the new world not taken. Unless this dark isolation ceases, I too, through sheer lack of experience, must soon be annihilated. Oh for a world, a heaven, where at last I can begin to fulfil the promise of my nature! Oh for the clash and concord and creative intercourse with others of my kind with whom I can rise beyond myself to richer, keener being!'

3. THE MEMBERS OF THE CREW

Musing in this style he suddenly recognized that a world was all the while around him. So absorbed had he been in his inner-drama that he had not noticed it. But now he knew that he had been all the while afloat in the sky over the burning city. He was the centre of an unbroken sphere of vision. Bodiless, his seeing was in no direction obstructed. Below him lay the fiery honeycomb; above, the climbing smoke plumes, with here and there a star, and the moon, now forging through little clouds. On every side he saw war's shafts of light and bursting suns of fire. An obscurity downwind was the fading cloudlet left by the bomber's recent explosion. Presently a near shell-burst engulfed him for a moment in an extremity of light and noise, but painlessly. And then an aeroplane, roaring out of the darkness, traversed harmlessly the very point from which he saw.

But once more his attention was distracted from his physical surroundings, for he became aware of the mental presence of his six killed companions.

The past lives of all were bared, like his own, for contemplation by all seven of them. It was as though all seven stood now together, each viewing all their seven pasts from the final instant in which all had died; as though all together looked along seven radiating tunnels of biography. All were embarrassingly aware of each other's most intimate experience. For though all had rid themselves of their mortal natures, they were as yet not fully equipped for mutual insight. Each was still fettered by much of the ignorance and prejudice of his particular life. And so, in each, the habit of comradeship and self-yielding to the crew's community was now put to new strain by this unwished-for intimacy. Formerly each, while outwardly performing his office in the common life, had preserved an inner sanctuary which the others could not, would not, violate. But now, in a bare instant, mutual perception was thrust on all. Shames formerly covered were now exposed. Conflicts formerly disciplined for the crew's sake, but always smouldering, now flamed.

Secretly, the pilot had always despised the rear-gunner's accent; the rear-gunner had resented the pilot's self-assurance. Forbearance for the crew's sake had restrained each from wounding the other. But now each looked with horror and incipient hate at the other's unexpressed but now unconcealable hostility. The navigator's diffidence, which had forced him always to be the last to go through a door, was now seen by all to be the fruit of secret annoyance and envy. The bomb-aimer's stammer, formerly an occasion for kindly indulgence, though for unexpressed contempt, revealed its root in the shame of an obscene desire which made all shudder and draw away.

There was one of the seven, the engineer, a newcomer, who in the air was wholly of the crew, bound by the filaments of the crew's unity; but off-duty he had remained apart, because of rough speech and manners and an inscrutable reticence. He now appeared to his six companions almost as a member of a strange barbarian tribe, or a creature of another world, never explored by any of the six. They, haling from little surburban villas and secondary schools, felt themselves to be integral to society. They regarded the policeman not indeed as their servant but at least as the necessary defender of orderly and decent living. But this other, nurtured in a northern work-town where work had formerly come almost to a standstill, where the common fate was hunger, sickness and social impotence, saw the whole convention of society's Structure as a device of the prosperous to keep the poor in subjection. Every policeman was for him an enemy. Looking down the vista of his days and nights, this seventh member saw, and his six companions saw with him, a filthy urchin sitting on the kerb-stone playing with a broken bottle in the gutter; while in the six other lifetimes all observed nice children sitting on suburban grass-plots. They watched the schoolboy in a crowded classroom discovering his native power, but constantly hampering himself by rebellious acts and consequent punishments. They saw the young man unemployed, gripped in that steel trap of privation and futility, listening to angry speeches at street comers and in shabby halls, poring over revolutionary tracts, and presently himself making earnestly subversive speeches, or skirmishing with policemen. They saw not only these distressing events but also the inner passion exfoliating day by day in the young man's heart, the passion of the iconoclast and the revolutionary. And they were outraged. For it seemed to these others, who, for all their man-of-the-world cynicism, had never really questioned the fundamental integrity of their society, that this passion sprang merely from self-pride and envy.

But the young revolutionary, looking into the lives of these sons of business men, clerks, shop assistants, mechanics, was amazed. Their parents, one and all, had been compelled by social circumstance to fight for a living against innumerable competitors, all seeking desperately for some foothold on the slope that leads up to affluence but down to penury; yet, these fathers and these sons, though they had been nearly always discontented and harassed, blamed merely their bad luck, or the state of trade, or bolshevik machinations, or the Jews, or the inveterate evil in man's heart. They never had any thought that their troubles were in fact the issue of some deep-lying social disease, and that they were poor little infected cells in the social body. But, to the seventh member of the crew, the engineer, it seemed that for such as these, and indeed for all men, there could never be any hope unless they could learn to understand the great social forces which had produced all this frustration and misery. And understanding would surely drive them to take action together about it.

All seven were plunged into revulsion and protest, long-enduring (so it seemed to them) as a lifetime of painful learning; but, measured in physical time, it happened in the instant. Little by little, yet in the instant, after the spell of bewilderment and horror a change came over the seven emergent spirits of the crew. For each of these beings, who had been through that strange remaking which had befallen the rear-gunner, were now apt for learning. They were no longer simply boys who had died. They were the beings that had been obscurely born of those seven, and had awakened into clear awareness in the extinction of those mortal seven. Therefore, after the first revulsion, they yearned together, each saluting the other's individuality with respect, and seeking mutual insight. The pilot and the rear-gunner laughingly forgave each other. The bomb-aimer's obsession was seen by all no longer as a devilish lust but as a psychical scar left by misfortune. The revolutionary was no longer spurned. For now the six saw that their condemnation of him was less moral than snobbish, a mere unthinking rejection of standards alien to the tribe. They reminded themselves that this seeming enemy of society, whose energy appeared to be sheer hate, had been also their own trusted companion in the crew, one who in action had been well-integrated with them, one to whom all had paid a special though none an intimate admiration.

Eager to do justice, they looked with clearer vision. They saw the schoolboy in his bare home struggling with his homework, while the mother soothed a crying baby. They saw the parents daily trying to conceal mutual irritation under their sorely tried affection. They saw the lad himself noting day by day that the source of all their distress was poverty. And they saw him conceiving through suffering and mutual aid a passion of comradeship for certain schoolmates and young fellow gangsters, and a growing need to give himself in corporate and comradely activity.

They savoured more intelligently the lad's frustration in unemployment; and his induction into the corporate life of the revolutionary Party, where at last he found peace in self-dedication to the revolution. With curiosity, with growing interest, and then with warm accord, they watched the young man's mind form itself by reading and the experience of social action, until he was fully disciplined to a commanding idea, the conception of mankind as something of high promise but of crippled actuality.

Through his fervour the six themselves now for the first time felt the power of this human gospel. 'It is indeed largely so,' they said, 'though the mortal boys that gave us being knew nothing of it.'

But they saw also, with their newly quickened intelligence, that the revolutionary's majestic vision of class conflict and social evolution, though in a way true and serviceable, reached nowhere into the depths of truth; and that their comrade, spellbound by a theory, had conceived the world too glibly. They were distressed, too, that in service of the revolution he had often broken the moral law that they unquestioningly accepted. For the sake of a political though never for a personal advantage he had often lied; given false interpretations of facts, vilified the personal character of the opponents and half-hearted friends of the revolution. In their post-mortal lucidity they could well understand how revolutionary passion had seemed to justify such conduct; but they were perplexed, recognizing that to behave in this way was to do violence to something sacred, to that temper, that way of life, that universal spirit, which all, obscurely swayed by echoes of the old religion, had dumbly and shame-facedly recognized as in some sense divine. But they could not honestly blame their comrade for this error, if indeed error it was; for its source was the generous passion for the freeing of mankind from bondage. And for their own part the six were now deeply ashamed of their own past obtuseness to the world's ills, and to the meaning of the great pattern of events in which all their lives had occurred.

The revolutionary seventh, on his side, having now fully recognized the personal reality of his six companions, looked with misgiving on many things in his own past, fearing that, in blind loyalty to the end, he had often, by lightly choosing evil means, done hurt to something without which the end, the true end, could never be achieved.

And so these disembodied seven, who in their former lives had scarcely ever given attention to the deeper questions, now entered perplexedly upon a philosophical discussion, if indeed such a name can be given to the strange direct interfusing of mind with mind which now swiftly brought them into accord.

Thus at last, through mutual insight, the community of the seven was restored and deepened. Each one of these diverse spirits, strangely born of the lives of seven young Englishmen, contributed his uniqueness to the common enrichment. And thus at last did their friendship find its consummation in intelligent love.

But in this final act of love the seven, as distinct beings, were doomed to attain not only their fulfilment but their end. For the upshot of this mystic fertilization of each by all was that all conceived within themselves co-operatively, or perhaps were gathered up into, a single spirit, which was the living identity of them all. Each with agony and terror but with overriding ecstasy was torn by strange death—or birth-throes. And out of this communal parturition, lethal to the seven, who now all fell headlong into nescience and non-entity, the single new-born spirit took wing.

New-born? Or newly awakened? Conceived perhaps much earlier in the seven's active comradeship, but hitherto somnolent, tranced, impotent, and now at last awake and free. Whatever the metaphysical truth of it, the seven now had died into an identical, more vital being, who was no one of them, nor yet the sum of them, but the heir of all their lives.

4. THE SPIRIT OF THE CREW

This being woke to find himself at first no more than the fragmentary, ephemeral and single-purposed spirit of a certain bomber crew.

Strange that the seven should be dissolved in a fellowship which, after all, had possessed them so superficially. Each of them had lived almost the whole of his life without any relation to the crew. Only in their final year, their last few months, had they been thrown together. Probably all of them, certainly some, had participated in associations far more expressive of their personal natures than the upstart and grimly simple crew. Yet now in death all died into that stark spirit. Seemingly the cause was that in the moment of death all were intensely concerned in the crew's united action. Moreover, only in the crew had they learnt to discipline their wills fully to a common purpose.

But indeed this simple spirit of a bomber crew was soon to discover in himself strange depths and heights of being. Brooding on the past lives of his seven members, he came to feel that, in some way still dark to him, he was in fact far more than the unity of those seven boys. As the sheer crew-spirit, he remembered those seven bodies as his own seven-fold body, though a body whose organs were often recalcitrant to the precariously enthroned common spirit. For each of his seven members had a life and a sentience and a will of his own. And each had a mentality far richer than the single-purposed spirit of the crew. Only in the air were they fully disciplined to the common will and to the fanatical simplicity of the common spirit. And even in the air they had remained seven individual minds, self-disciplined under a common loyalty.

But now, he who had emerged from the seven, felt that all the while he had been resident in each one of them, identical in each, though for the most part unconscious, deeply submerged, rising into clear perception and integral will only on those occasions when the crew's action was most single-purposed. When it was less so, when some of his members were keyed up for battle and some were reluctant, then it was he himself (so it now seemed to him) who goaded the faint-hearted ones into courage, as a man may goad his own tired muscles into the vigour of desperation.

Looking back, it seemed to him that not merely the seven but the very machine that imprisoned them had been part of his body. For through the seven's well-trained senses and through their instruments, and through their muscles and their mechanical controls, he lived the life of that composite being, biological and mechanical. As a man driving a car may feel the roughness of the road through the tyres, and the steepness of the hill through the straining engine, so he felt through those seven bodies and through the wings and air-screws and straining engines the very texture of the atmosphere, and the thrust and swoop of the plane. And as a man's will controls a car, so he, through the seven minds who were but organs of his own mind, controlled and fought the plane. Looking back into his past, it seemed to him that he had always since the crew's founding been present in each of his members as the identical will for efficient flying, efficient defence, efficient attack, and safe return. In the past he had participated only in the vaguest and most ineffectual manner in the personal lives of his members outside the aeroplane, outside the carapace of their common life in the crew. He knew them only in so far as they were intimate with each other. But now in their death and mutual insight he became fully possessed of all their experience.

In life, each one of them had been an individual boy fleetingly possessed by the crew's unity. Moreover each had been a member also of other communal beings. For each had shared in other groupings, in family, school, team, working gang and innumerable other less durable associations. Looking back into the earlier lives of the seven, the spirit of the crew told himself that in the time before ever they came together as a crew he could have had no part in any of them at all. Indeed in those days, seemingly (though somehow he could not believe it) he had no being anywhere. And even later, in the time of the crew, one or other of his precious members was often possessed for a while by sheer self-concern, or by interest in some corporate being other than the crew. And indeed the young revolutionary, though of all the seven he had been the most self-disciplined to the crew in action, was also in his heart aloof, because dedicated ultimately to a loftier loyalty.

'But I, I, who am I?' questioned the crew's spirit. 'Am I really no more than the ephemeral community of the seven in whose lives I was conceived, and in whose death I discovered myself? And what future, if any, lies before me? In what world can I take action to express my nature more fully than my seven members could ever do?'

For as the crew's simple spirit brooded over the lives of his seven members, all their diverse individualities became absorbed into himself. His nature deepened to include the whole wealth of all their being.

Further, it seemed to him that, though his contact with the world was limited to the experience of his seven members, yet in some manner he was indeed far more than those seven. Though they were in a sense his parents, yet it now seemed to him most insistently that throughout all their lives, and not merely since the forming of the crew, he had always been present within each one of them, feeding on the diversity of the experience of those young human persons, and always an identical spirit in them all. But always, until their death, he had been a sleep-walker.

Nay more. It seemed to him that not only in the seven but in all those whom the seven had ever known, in their lovers, friends, colleagues, enemies, a spirit lived which, if only he could reach out to it, would prove to be himself, or, if not himself, then perhaps some more lucid spirit, that he, like all those others, strangely harboured.

Intently brooding on those seven lives, assessing the quality of their fumbling commerce with their fellow mortals and with the world, this being who seemingly had been born of the seven as the starkly simple spirit of their vivid community in action, now seemed to himself far older than the seven, seemed indeed primeval, perhaps eternal, seemed also to be of umplumbed depth, and subtlety. And now he was possessed by an obscure but passionate longing to be more fully, more lucidly himself, and to come into active commerce and communion with a world. As a sleeper may sometimes struggle vainly and in terror to spring from sleeping into waking, while his limbs remain paralysed, his eyes shut, and his mind crushed down as though under a great weight of water, so this being struggled to wake and be fully himself, and greet the unknown world, the great reality beyond himself.