The New Adam

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Copyright 1939 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company.

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Printed in the U. S. A.

The New Adam

Stanley G. Weinbaum

PROLOGUE

INTRODUCTION

BOOK I: The Pursuit of Knowledge

BOOK II: Power

BOOK III: The Pursuit of Pleasure

PROLOGUE

THIS is a story of a superman. It details his origin, his search for happiness, his loves, and finally, his success or failure, of which you alone can judge. It is a story perhaps fantastic, but a story based, nevertheless, on possibilities.

A superman is not a man, not a creature of the species Homo Sapiens; this is the fallacy of Nietzsche, the fallacy of H.G. Wells. These, like others who deal with the matter, have believed that a man, a human being, raised to the nth degree, represents the superman. Nietzsche picked one set of qualities—those of fitness, potency, power—Wells chose another set, the contemplative, the serene, the intellectual. So probably, a Neanderthaler in his filthy cave, using his embryonic imagination, might have pictured his superman as a giant in strength and size, a mighty hunter, one whose meat-pot and belly is never empty. Certainly he never considered a race whose very thoughts were partly beyond his conception, and he saw nothing ironical in freezing to death upon a ledge of coal. As we are to the cave man, superman must be to us. His coming is surely a possibility; perhaps it is inevitable.

For not everything in the world is subject to mathematics. Not every factor in this particular sector of the cosmic whirl can be reduced to formula, expressed in calculus, integrated, packed into nicely labeled bundles, and filed away in a book. Because one rises from the dinner table and announces his intention to go across the hall to the library, it does not inevitably follow that he will arrive there. There is a chance factor in the universe—entropy, luck, free will, or what you wish—but an x-factor that prohibits exact calculation. Nothing is ever quite certain, and behind every cause lies another more obscure. A housewife puts a kettle of water on the fire to boil; it will almost certainly boil, but there is a chance, a very slight one, that it will freeze. For even the transfer of heat is a random process, and the water may dissipate its warmth to the fire.

Mendel packed heredity in a neat mathematical box; Freud and Jung labeled and filed environment. Yet variations creep in. Sometimes an offspring possesses qualities which neither parent could possibly have transmitted; biologists call these beings “sports”; evolutionists speak of “mutations.” These odd individuals are common enough in the plant kingdom and the insect world; their discovery creates not a ripple of scientific excitement, and day by day the curious natural experiments are born and work out their destinies. Sometimes, if the variants possess inherent advantages, they survive and breed true as a new species, sometimes they breed back into the mass and are lost, and sometimes they die. A commonplace of Nature among plants and insects; it is seldom that a scientist thinks of the phenomenon in terms of humanity.

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

DAWN ON OLYMPUS

ANNA HALL died as stolidly as she had lived, died unimaginatively in childbirth; and was perhaps spared some maternal pangs, for her strange son lived. Nor did grim middle-aged John Hall waste his emotional strength in either futile regrets or useless recriminations of the child. This business of living was a stern, pitiless affair; one took what befell and did not argue. He accepted the infant, and named it after his own father, old Edmond.

It must have been a rare accident of genes and determinants that produced Edmond Hall—a spindly infant, straight-legged from birth, with oddly light eyes. Yet his strangest abnormality, one that set brisk Doctor Lindquist muttering, was his hands, his tiny slim fingers, for each of these possessed an extra joint. He clenched his three-knuckled thumb against his four-knuckled fingers into a curious little fist, and stared tearlessly with yellowish gray gaze.

“She would not have a hospital,” Doctor Lindquist was muttering. “This is what comes of home births.” One doubted that he meant only Anna’s demise; his eyes were on her son.

John Hall said nothing; there was little, indeed, that he could say. Without cavil and in grim acceptance of little Edmond, he did what was to be done; he arranged for a nurse to care for the child, and returned somberly to his law practice.