theory proved in exploding steel, the advance of chemistry into the field of systemic poison, electronics perfected till it kills at a distance, brilliant researches into how to stop breathing! Instead of the explosion of the bombs, we hear the sharp click of metal on glass. A glass cage is being closed. Inside is a live rat, watched by a woman assistant wearing a fantastic new gas mask. She opens a pinchcock in a tube leading to the cage, starts her stopwatch. The rat claws frantically at the glass. The sweep second hand marks off three seconds, four, five. The watch is stopped. She opens the cage and with forceps lifts out the dead rat, close. She puts the rat down on a glass plate or in a porcelain pan, and slits it open with a scalpel. The slit rat dissolves, becomes Robinson's face, with its black eye shield. It is as if only a few seconds had passed since he turned on the power. The most evil, the most malevolent forces in the world have also used the tools of science, and naturally they have used them to destroy men. The worst crime of fascism has been that it has forced democracy, too, to pervert science to the mathematics of warwhere X equals death. Robinson turns off the power. The needles go back to zero. His notebook page, except for the date, is still empty. He tears the page out, and writes: Dr. Lawrence: I am leaving... His pen pauses. ... for a few days. Got some problems to work out for the Monday class.-Robinson. SEQUENCE 2: THE QUESTION IN THE SEA Mist coming in over the sea. The camera pans over, past rocks and spray, to the pinnacle of rock on which Robinson is standing. Perhaps i would be better if there were no scie ce, or if man had never ev lved. Or perhaps, if life itself had never begun. Sound of seals barking, on little islands invisible in the mist. Far to his right, below, is a stretch of white beach. Tiny figures of children at play down there. A dog, very small and black, attacking the ocean as it recedes, retreating from it as it strikes back. The camera pans slowly back to the mist coming in over the water. Robinson, with the black patch on his face, looks back at the slow, heavy sea. Here, in a place like this, life began. Here the first cluster of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, took nourishment out of rock, air, water, and made more clusters in its own form, and multiplied itself. Here the long adventure began. A flock of cormorants flap slowly across the movement of the ocean. Robinson climbs down across the roded rock formations, reaches the bottom, kneels, and puts his hand in a small pool of the sea. He pulls out a small crustacean, a kind of sea snail. We see its slimy foot under the shell, searching blindly for a place to cling. He throws it back among the rocks. Frightened, swarms of crabs scuttle back into crevices in the rock. He captures one, holds it up to look at the grasping front claws, then drops it into the water. The sea comes foaming up oward the camera, and recedes, and rushes up again between the rocks. Here in the foam live the billions of microorganisms, full of blind hunger, blind fear, scavengers and cannibals, without memory or conscience, the ancestors of man. Man, himself the apex 175 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.149 on Mon, 03 Oct 2016 06:02:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms