“The biological mapping had become a pointless game, the new flora following exactly the emergent lines anticipated twenty years earlier, and he was sure that no one at Camp Byrd in Northern Greenland bothered to file his reports, let alone read them.”
Dr. Kierans muses upon the futility of the scientific endeavors that he was previously engaged in. He believes that scientific research ought to yield new discoveries that should provide humanity with new direction. His supposed “discoveries” however do not serve to push humanity forward as he had wanted instead his findings merely serve to prove the scientific projections of the previous scientific minds.
"Dr. Bodkin, did you live in London as a child? You must have many sentimental memories to recapture, of the great palaces and museums." He added: "Or are the only memories you have pre-uterine ones?"
Strangeman tries to appeal to Dr. Bodkin’s sentiments to win him over to his cause of reclaim the old cities of men. This also gives the reader insight into the inner workings of the cunning Strangeman’s mind--especially his ending quip, a less than subtly veiled insult--revealing him to be not just a manipulative individual but also one who has little regard for anyone but himself.
"Colonel, you've got to flood it again, laws or no laws. Have you been down in those streets; they're obscene and hideous! It's a nightmare world that's dead and finished, Strangeman's resurrecting a corpse!"
Dr. Kierans reveals his disgust for the old ways of mankind. Far as he is concerned man’s time at the top of the food chain is done and the best thing--the only acceptable response--at least in his mind, is for man to gracefully and graciously step down rather than desperately hang on to the vestiges of the humanity’s old glory.
