eter

Oswald Cabal: There! There they go! That faint gleam of light.

Raymond Passworthy: I feel what we have done is monstrous.

Oswald Cabal: What they have done is magnificent.

Raymond Passworthy: Will they come back?

Oswald Cabal: Yes. And go again and again, until the landing can be made and the moon is conquered. This is only a beginning.

Raymond Passworthy: And if they don’t come back.. my son, and your daughter? What of that, Cabal?”

Oswald Cabal: Then presently others will go.

Raymond Passworthy: Oh, God, is there ever to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?

Oswald Cabal: Rest enough for the individual man… too much, and too soon, and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest.  First this little planet with its winds and ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him. And at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time… still he will be beginning.

Raymond Passworthy:  But… we’re such little creatures. Poor humanity’s so fragile, so weak. Little… little animals.

Oswald Cabal:  Little animals. If we’re no more than animals, we must snatch each little scrap of happiness and live and suffer and pass, mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done. Is it this or that. All the universe or nothingness!  Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be? 

Things to Come (1936)