rather, education.
It didn’t require any effort to imagine himself in the supreme post, and this was in the spirit of the competition. He sighed when he thought about the fact that
his
government would only be a transitional organisation. His task and his duty would only be to prepare the way for the plan to finally take shape, but it was inevitable. This period would require at least four or five years, and he should not pretend to himself otherwise. Following the three years already planned, there would only remain one or two to tackle the major task. He decided to devoteonly one day of this competition, which he was experiencing now like some scaled down representation of reality, to sketch out a plan of essential research. He should reserve the greater part of his remaining time for the subject of education.
So it was this chapter which he tackled straight away: the education of a world freed from miserable cares and capable of rising above its lamentable condition of ignorance, provided that the central organisation did its duty by leading it in the right direction. Father Teilhard provided precious help again in illustrating his way of thinking. At the head of his study he quoted almost in its entirety, without omitting the capital letters, a passage he had read in
The Phenomenon of Man,
which he had remembered the night before while half asleep:
The moment will come, and it is necessary that it should come, when Man… will recognise that Science is not for him an accessory occupation, but an essential form of activity, a natural derivative in fact, open to the excess of forms of energy constantly being set free by Machines.
An Earth, on which forms of leisure are always on the increase and interest is always unfulfilled, and which will find their vital resolution in the act of making everything more profound, of attempting everything, of prolonging everything… an Earth on which, not only for the army of researchers which has been brought together and subsidised but also for the man in the street, the problem of the day will be the conquest of a secret and of a greater power, which shall have been snatched from the body’s corpuscles, from the stars or even organised matter.
It was to enable the world to attain this great moment that Fawell devoted the greatest part of the time remaining to him. If he managed to lead the world to the point of ‘sublimation of interest’, to use Wells’ phrase 2 , everything would becomepossible. To get to that stage in a few years was not going to be easy. Wells had predicted that it would take more than a hundred and fifty years to reach this threshold, but his modern state was not really scientific. From the start he did not have a sufficiently high vision. They should be able to progress much more quickly.
After the quotation Fawell allowed himself a few more minutes of reverie, trying hard to conjure up an image of Earth at the end of the nine years. Then he gave some thought to his daughter. It was the first time he had thought about her since the start of the competition, as he was focused on the future with every fibre of his being. Ruth would definitely experience the whole glorious metamorphosis. She would not yet be thirty years old when he would be passing on the torch to another.
He trembled as he thought of what women like her and men like Nicolas Zarratoff would be able to undertake. In order for this to come about it was necessary for the task he was embarking on to be successful. It would be. Fawell swore this to himself and leaned forward on his desk.
7.
It was O’Kearn’s genius which gave definitive shape to the project for a world government and established the process of selecting its members. He received the delegation of the young scholars with the benevolence that was customary with him, except when he found himself faced with scientific heresy, in which case he could become fierce. Fawell’s three companions were not unknown to him. There was