NIGHTMARE VISION
Well, why not? In man's long ascent from the primeval jelly on the shallow shores of the warm first seas, he had worn myriad shapes. And as he moved higher from one form to another, changing to vertebrate, discarding cold blood for warm, still was he kin to the fish he caught to-day, to the furred creatures whose pelts clothed his women, to the apes he brought from the jungles to study or to amuse him. Even the spiders that spun in his gardens, the scorpion that scuttled from the tread of his feet, were abysmally distant blood-brothers.
When St. Francis of Assisi had spoken of Brother Fly, Brother Wolf, Brother Snake, he had voiced scientific truth. All life on earth had a common origin. Divergent now and Protean shaped, still man and beast, fish and serpent, lizard and bird, ant and bee and spider, all had come from those once similar specks of jelly, adrift millions upon millions of years ago in the shallow littorals of the first seas. Protabion, Gregory of Edinburgh had named it—the first stuff of life from which all life was to develop. Were the germs of all those shapes man had worn in his slow upward climb still dormant in him?
Roux, the great French scientist, had taken the eggs of frogs and, by manipulating them, had produced giant frogs and dwarfs, frogs with two heads and one body, frogs with one head and eight legs, three-headed frogs with legs numerous as centipedes'. And he had produced from these eggs, also, creatures which in no way resembled frogs at all.
Vornikoff, the Russian, and Schwartz, the German, had experimented with still higher forms of life, producing chimera, nightmare things they had been forced to slay—and quickly. If Roux and the others had done all this—and they had done it, Graydon knew—then was it not possible for greater scientists to awaken those dormant germs in man, and similarly create—such creatures as the scarlet thing? A spider man! Nature, herself, had given them the hint. Nature from time to time produced such abnormalities—human monsters marked outwardly if not inwardly with the stigmata of the beast, the fish, even the crustacean. Babies with gill slits in their throats; babies with tails; babies furred. The human embryo passed through all these stages, from the protoplasmic unicell up—compressing the age-long drama of evolution into less than a year. Might it not well be, then, that in Yu-Atlanchi dwelt those to whom the crucible of birth held no secrets; who could dip within it and mold from its contents what they would?
A loom is a dead machine upon which fingers work more or less clumsily. The spider is both machine and artisan, spinning and weaving more surely, more exquisitely than can any lifeless mechanism worked by man. What man-made machine had ever approached the delicacy, the beauty of the spider's web?
Suddenly Graydon seemed to behold a whole new world of appalling grotesquerie—Spiderman and spider-women spread upon huge webs and weaving with needled fingers wondrous fabrics, mole-men and mole-women burrowing, opening mazes of subterranean passages, cloaca, for those who had wrought them into being; amphibian folk busy about the waters—a phantasmagoria of humanity, monstrously twinned with Nature's perfect machine, while still plastic in the womb! Shuddering, he thrust away that nightmare vision