“Could we do otherwise? But it has ceased to be purely egotism. It is no longer, ‘I am I’ but ‘I am part.’... One wants to be an honourable part.”
“You think of man upon his planet,” the doctor pursued. “I think of life rather as a mind that tries itself over in millions and millions of trials. But it works out to the same thing.”
“I think in terms of fuel,” said Sir Richmond.
He was still debating the doctor’s generalization. “I suppose it would be true to say that I think of myself as mankind on his planet, with very considerable possibilities and with only a limited amount of fuel at his disposal to achieve them. Yes.... I agree that I think in that way.... I have not thought much before of the way in which I think about things—but I agree that it is in that way. Whatever enterprises mankind attempts are limited by the sum total of that store of fuel upon the planet. That is very much in my mind. Besides that he has nothing but his annual allowance of energy from the sun.”
“I thought that presently we were to get unlimited energy from atoms,” said the doctor.
“I don’t believe in that as a thing immediately practicable. No doubt getting a supply of energy from atoms is a theoretical possibility,—just as flying was in the time of Dædalus; probably there were actual attempts at some sort of glider in ancient Crete. But before we get to the actual
