"Make ready!" he cried. "The great uprooting!" He began to laugh unsteadily. "The end of disease and the end of desire--there's no difference. You never knew that, brothers. I've come back to tell you--thousands and thousands of miles--into the great dimension of hell and heaven. It was a mistake and I'm going back. Look! She's fading--further and further----" He pointed a shaking hand across the room and suddenly collapsed, half supported by the manager. "Dead drunk," remarked a neighbour. I turned. "No. Live drunk," I said. "The champagne has brought him back to the world of desire." The speaker, a clean-shaven young man, stared insolently. "You have no business to come into a public place with that disease," he said with a sneer. "You are right. I have no business here. My business is to warn the world that the end of desire is at hand." I signalled to a waiter and together we managed to get Sarakoff into a taxi-cab. As we drove home, all that lay behind Sarakoff's broken confused words revealed itself with increasing distinctness to me. Sarakoff spoke again. "Harden," he muttered thickly, "there was a flaw--in the dream----" "Yes," I said. "I was sure there would be a flaw. I hadn't noticed it before----" "We're cut off," he whispered. "Cut off." CHAPTER XXI JASON Next morning the headlines of the newspapers blazed out the news of the meeting at the Queen's Hall, and the world read the words of Sarakoff. Strange to say, most of the papers seemed inclined to view the situation seriously. "If," said one in a leading article, "it really means that immortality is coming to humanity--and there is, at least, much evidence from Birmingham that supports the view that the germ cures all sickness--then we are indeed face to face with a strange problem. For how will immortality affect us as a community? As a community, we live together on the tacit assumption that the old will die and the young will take their place. All our laws and customs are based on this idea. We can scarcely think of any institution that is not established upon the certainty of death. What, then, if death ceases? Our food supply----" I was interrupted, while reading, by my servant who announced that a gentleman wished to see me on urgent business. I laid aside the paper and waited for him to enter. My early visitor was a tall, heavily-built man, with strong eyes. He was carefully dressed. He looked at me attentively, nodded, and sat down. "My name is Jason--Edward Jason. You have no doubt heard of me." "Certainly," I said. "You are the proprietor of this paper that I have just been reading." He nodded. "And of sixty other daily papers, Dr. Harden," he said in a soft voice. "I control much of the opinion in the country, and I intend to control it all before I die."