Force and Only Force


	Everywhere throughout the great San Joaquin, unseen and unheard, a thousand plows up-stirred the land; tens of thousands of shears clutched deep into the warm, moist soil.
		It was the long, stroking caress, vigorous, male, powerful, for which the earth seemed panting. The heroic embrace of a multitude of iron hands, gripping deep into the brown, warm flesh of the land that quivered responsive and passionate under this rude advance, so robust as to be almost an assault, so violent as to be veritably brutal.
There, under the sun and under the speckless sheen of the sky, the wooing of the Titan began, the vast primal passion, the two world forces, the elemental male and female, locked in a colossal embrace, at grapples in the throes of an infinite desire, at once terrible and divine, knowing no law, untamed, savage, natural, sublime.
		Men were nothings, mere animalcules, mere ephemeredes that fluttered and fell and were forgotten between dusk and dawn. Vanamee had said there was no death. But for one second, Presley could go one step further.
Men were naught, death was naught; FORCE once existed- FORCE that brought men into the world, FORCE that crowded them out of it to make way for the succeeding generation, FORCE that made the wheat grow, FORCE that garnered it from the soil to give place for the succeeding crop.
		Somehow he could not deny it. It rang with the clear reverberation of truth. Was no one, then, to blame for the horror at the irrigating ditch? Forces, conditions, laws of supply and demand- were these, then, the enemies, after all? Not enemies; there was no malevolence in nature. Colossal indifference only, a vast trend toward appointed goals.
Nature was then, a gigantic engine, a vast cyclopean power, huge, terrible, a leviathan with a heart of steel, knowing no compunction, no forgiveness, no tolerance; crushing out the human atom standing in its way with nirvanic calm, the agony of destruction sending never a jar, never the faintest tremor through all that prodigious mechanism of wheels and cogs.