City of Endless Night
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Milo Hastings >> City of Endless Night
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"What then?" I asked.
The big fellow smiled with a childish pride, and doubling up his arm, as
huge as an average man's thigh, he patted his biceps. "I get it all
right. I pass examination, no flaws in me, never been to hospital, not
one day. Yes, I get it."
"Get what?"
"Paternity," said the man in a lower voice, as he glanced about to see
if any of his fellows was listening. "Paternity, you know? Women!"
I thought of many questions but feared to ask them. The worker waited
for some men to pass, then he bent over me, grinning sardonically. "Did
you see them? You have seen women, yes?"
"Yes," I ventured, "I have seen women."
"Pretty good, beautiful, yes?"
"Yes," I stammered, "they are very beautiful." But I was getting nervous
and moved away. The workman, hesitating a little, then followed at
my side.
"But tell me," I said, "about these calories. What did you do to get the
big meals? Why do some get more to eat than others?"
"Better man," he replied without hesitation.
"But what makes a better man?"
"You don't know; of course, you are an intellectual and don't work. But
we work hard. The harder we work the more we eat. I load aluminum pigs
on the elevator. One pig is two calories, nineteen hundred pigs a day,
pretty good, yes? All kind of work has its calories, so many for each
thing to do.
"More work, more food it takes to do it. They say all is alike, that no
one can get fat. But all work calories are not alike because some men
get fatter than others. I don't get fat; my work is hard. I ought to get
two and a half calories for each pig I load. Still I do not get thin,
but I do not play hard in gymnasium, see? Those lathe men, they got it
too easy and they play hard in gymnasium. I don't care if you do report.
I got it mad at them; they got it too easy. One got paternity last year
already, and he is not as good a man as I am. I could throw him over my
shoulder in wrestling. Do you not think they get it too easy?"
"Do the men like this system," I asked; "the measuring of food by the
amount of work one does? Do any of them talk about it and demand that
all be fed alike?"
"The skinny minimum eaters do," said the workman with a sneer, "when we
let them talk, which isn't often, but when they get a chance they talk
Bellamism. But what if they do talk, it does them no good. We have a red
flag, we have Imperial Socialism; we have the House of Hohenzollern.
Well, then, I say, let them talk if they want to, every man must eat
according to his work; that is socialism. We can't have Bellamism when
we have socialism."
This speech, so much more informative and evidencing a knowledge I had
not anticipated, quite disturbed me. "You talk about these things," I
ventured, "in your Free Speech Halls?"
The hitherto pleasant face of the workingman altered to an ugly frown.
"No you don't," he growled, "you don't think because I talk to you, that
you can go asking me what is not your right to know, even if you are
an officer?"
I remained discreetly silent, but continued to walk at the side of the
striding giant. Presently I asked:
"What do you do now, are you going to work?"
"No," he said, looking at me doubtfully, "that was dinner, not
breakfast. I am going now to the picture hall."
"And then," I asked, "do you go to bed?"
"No," he said, "we then go to the gymnasium or the gaming tables. Six
hours' work, six hours' sleep, and four hours for amusement."
"And what do you do," I asked, "the remainder of the day?"
He turned and stared at me. "That is all we get here, sixteen hours.
This is the metal workers' level. Some levels get twenty hours. It
depends on the work."
"But," I said, "a real day has twenty-four hours."
"I've heard," he said, "that it does on the upper levels."
"But," I protested, "I mean a real day--a day of the sun. Do you
understand that?"
"Oh yes," he said, "we see the pictures of the Place in the Sun. That's
a fine show."
"Oh," I said, "then you have pictures of the sun?"
"Of course," he replied, "the sun that shines upon the throne. We all
see that."
At the time I could not comprehend this reference, but I made bold to
ask if it were forbidden me to go to his picture hall.
"I can't make out," he said, "why you want to see, but I never heard of
any order forbidding it.
"I go here," he remarked, as we came to a picture theatre.
I let my Herculean companion enter alone, but followed him shortly and
found a seat in a secluded corner. No one disputed my presence.
The music that filled the hall from some hidden horn was loud and, in a
rough way, joyous. The pictures--evidently carefully prepared for such
an audience--were limited to the life that these men knew. The themes
were chiefly of athletic contests, of boxing, wrestling and feats of
strength. There were also pictures of working contests, always ending by
the awarding of honours by some much bespangled official. But of love
and romance, of intrigue and adventure, of pathos and mirth, these
pictures were strangely devoid,--there was, in fact, no woman's likeness
cast upon the screen and no pictures depicting emotion or sentiment.
As I watched the sterile flittings of the picture screen I decided,
despite the glimmering of intelligence that my talking Hercules had
shown in reference to socialism and Bellamism and the secrets of the
Free Speech Halls, that these men were merely great stupid beasts
of burden.
They worked, they fed, they drank, they played exuberantly in their
gymnasiums and swimming pools, they played long and eagerly at games of
chance. Beyond this their lives were essentially blank. Ambition and
curiosity they had none beyond the narrow circle of their round of
living. But for all that they were docile, contented and, within their
limitations, not unhappy. To me they seemed more and more to be like
well cared for domestic animals, and I found myself wondering, as I left
the hall, why we of the outer world had not thought to produce pictures
in similar vein to entertain our dogs and horses.
~5~
As I returned to my own quarters, I tried to recall the description I
had read of the "Children of the Abyss," the dwellers in ancient city
slums. There was a certain kinship, no doubt, between those former
submerged workers in the democratic world and this labour breed of
Berlin. Yet the enslaved and sweated workers of the old regime were
always depicted as suffering from poverty, as undersized, ill-nourished
and afflicted with disease. The reformers of that day were always
talking of sanitary housing, scientific diet and physical efficiency.
But here was a race of labourers whose physical welfare was as well
taken care of as if they had been prize swine or oxen. There was a
paleness of countenance among these labourers of Berlin that to me
seemed suggestive of ill health, but I knew that was merely due to lack
of sun and did not signify a lack of physical vitality. Mere
sun-darkened skin does not mean physiological efficiency, else the negro
were the most efficient of races. Men can live without sun, without
rain, without contact with the soil, without nature's greenery and the
brotherhood of fellow species in wild haunts. The whole climb of
civilization had been away from these primitive things. It had merely
been an artificial perfecting of the process of giving the living
creature that which is needed for sustenance and propagation in the most
concentrated and most economical form, the elimination of Nature's
superfluities and wastes.
As I thought of these things it came over me that this unholy
imprisonment of a race was but the logical culmination of mechanical and
material civilization. This development among the Germans had been
hastened by the necessities of war and siege, yet it was what the whole
world had been driving toward since man first used a tool and built a
hut. Our own freer civilization of the outer world had been achieved
only by compromises, by a stubborn resistance against the forces to
which we ascribed our progress. We were merely not so completely
civilized, because we had never been wholly domesticated.
As I now record these thoughts on the true significance of the perfected
civilization of the Germans I realize that I was even more right than I
then knew, for the sunless city of Berlin is of a truth a civilization
gone to seed, its people are a domesticated species, they are the
logical outcome of science applied to human affairs, with them the
prodigality and waste of Nature have been eliminated, they have stamped
out contagious diseases of every kind, they have substituted for the
laws of Nature the laws that man may pick by scientific theory and
experiment from the multitude of possibilities. Yes, the Germans were
civilized. And as I pondered these things I recalled those fairy tales
that naturalists tell of the stagnant and fixed society of ants in their
subterranean catacombs. These insect species credited for industry and
intelligence, have in their lesser world reached a similar perfection of
civilization. Ants have a royal house, they have a highly specialized
and fixed system of caste, a completely socialized state--yes, a
Utopia--even as Berlin was a Utopia, with the light of the sun and the
light of the soul, the soul of the wild free man, forever shut out. Yes,
I was walking in Utopia, a nightmare at the end of man's long
dream--Utopia--Black Utopia--City of Endless Night--diabolically
compounded of the three elements of civilization in which the Germans
had always been supreme--imperialism, science and socialism.
CHAPTER IV
I GO PLEASURING ON THE LEVEL OF FREE WOMEN AND DRINK SYNTHETIC BEER
~1~
I had returned from my adventure on the labour levels in a mood of
sombre depression. Alone again in my apartment I found difficulty in
getting my mind back upon chemical books. With a sense of relief I
reported to Holknecht that I thought myself sufficiently recovered to
return to work.
My laboratory I found to be almost as secluded as my living quarters. I
was master there, and as a research worker I reported to no man until I
had finished the problem assigned me. From my readings and from
Holknecht's endless talking I had fairly well grasped the problem on
which I was supposed to be working, and I now had Holknecht go carefully
over the work he had done in my absence and we prepared a report. This I
sent to headquarters with a request for permission to start work on
another problem, the idea for which I claimed to have conceived on my
visit to the attacked potash mines.
Permission to undertake the new problem was promptly granted. I now set
to work to reproduce in a German laboratory the experiments by which I
had originally conquered the German gas that had successfully defended
those mines from the world for over a century. Though loath to make this
revelation, I knew of no other "Discovery" wherewith to gain the stakes
for which I was playing.
Events shaped themselves most rapidly along the lines of my best hopes.
The new research proved a blanket behind which to hide my ignorance. We
needed new material, new apparatus, and new data and I encouraged
Holknecht to advise me as to where to obtain these things and so gained
requisite working knowledge.
The experiments and demonstrations finished, I made my report. My
immediate superior evidently quickly recognized it as a matter too
important for his consideration and dutifully passed it up to his own
superiors. In a few days I was notified to prepare for a demonstration
before a committee of the Imperial Chemical Staff.
They came to my small laboratory with much eager curiosity. From their
manner of making themselves known to me I realized with joy that they
were dealing with a stranger. Indeed it was improbable that it should
have been otherwise for there were upwards of fifty thousand chemists of
my rank in Berlin.
The demonstration went off with a flourish and the committee were
greatly impressed. Means were at once taken to alter the gas with which
the Stassfurt mines were flooded, but I realized that meant nothing
since I believed that my companions had abandoned the enterprise and the
secret that had enabled me to invade mines had not been shared with any
one in the outer world.
As I anticipated, my revelation was accepted by the Chemical Staff as
evidence of profound scientific genius. It followed as a logical matter
that I should be promoted to the highest rank of research chemists with
the title of Colonel. Because of my youth the more was made of the
honour. This promotion entitled me to double my previous salary, to a
larger laboratory and larger and better living quarters in a distant
part of the city.
My assistant would now be of the rank I had previously been and as
Holknecht was not eligible to such promotion I was removed entirely from
all previous acquaintances and surroundings and so greatly decreased the
chance of discovery of my true identity.
~2~
After I had removed to my new quarters I was requested to call at the
office of the Chemical Staff to discuss the line of research I should
next take up. My adviser in this matter was the venerable Herr von Uhl,
a white haired old patriarch whose jacket was a mass of decorations. The
insignia on the left breast indicating the achievements in chemical
science were already familiar to me, but those on the right breast
were strange.
Perhaps I stared at them a little, for the old man, noting my interest,
remarked proudly, "Yes, I have contributed much glory to the race and
our group,--one hundred and forty-seven children,--one hundred and four
of them sons, fifty-eight already of a captain's rank, and twenty-nine
of them colonels--my children of the second and third generation number
above two thousand. Only three men living in Berlin have more total
descendants--and I am but seventy-eight years of age. If I live to be
ninety I shall break all records of the Eugenic Office. It all comes of
good breeding and good work. I won my paternity right, when I was but
twenty-eight, just about your age. If you pass the physical test,
perhaps you can duplicate my record. For this early promotion you have
won qualifies you mentally."
Astonished and alarmed beyond measure I could find no reply and sat
staring dumbly, while Herr von Uhl, beginning to speak of chemical
matters, inquired if I had any preference as to the problem I should now
take up. Incapable of any clear thinking I could only ask if he had any
to suggest.
Immediately the old man's face brightened. "A man of your genius," he
said, "should be permitted to try his brain with the greatest problems
on which the life of Germany depends. The Staff discussed this and has
assigned you to original research for the finding of a better method of
the extraction of protium from the ore. To work on this assignment you
must of necessity share grave secrets, which, should they be disclosed,
might create profound fears, but your professional honour is a sufficient
guarantee of secrecy. In this research you will compete with some of the
most distinguished chemists in Berlin. If you should be successful you
will be decorated by His Majesty and you will receive a liberal pension
commensurate with the value of your discovery."
I was profoundly impressed. Evidently I had stumbled upon something of
vital importance, the real nature of which I did not in the least
comprehend, and happily was not supposed to. The interview was ended by
my being entrusted with voluminous unpublished documents which I was
told to take home and study. Two armed men were ordered to accompany me
and to stand alternate guard outside my apartment while I had the
documents in my possession.
~3~
In the quiet of my new abode I unsealed the package. The first sheet
contained the official offer of the rewards in store for success with
the research. The further papers explained the occasion for the gravity
and secrecy, and outlined the problem.
The colossal consequence of the matter with which I was dealing gripped
and thrilled me. Protium, it seemed, was the German name for a rare
element of the radium group, which, from its atomic weight and other
properties, I recognized as being known to the outside world only as a
laboratory curiosity of no industrial significance.
But, as used by the Germans, this element was the essence of life
itself, for by the influence of its emanations, they had achieved the
synthesis of protein capable of completely nourishing the human body--a
thing that could be accomplished in the outside world only through the
aid of natural protein derived from plants and animals.
How I wished, as I read, that my uncle could have shared with me this
revelation of a secret that he had spent his life in a fruitless effort
to unravel. We had long since discovered how the Germans had synthesized
the carbohydrate molecule from carbon dioxide and water and built
therefrom the sugars, starches and fat needed for human nutrition. We
knew quite as well how they had created the simpler nitrogen compounds,
that this last step of synthesizing complete food proteins--a step
absolutely essential to the support of human life wholly from synthetic
foods--the chemists of the outer world had never mastered.
But no less interesting than the mere chemistry of all this was the
history of it all, and the light it threw on the larger story of how
Germany had survived when the scientists of the world had predicted her
speedy annihiliation. The original use of protium had, I found, been
discovered late in the Twentieth Century when the protium ores of the
Ural Mountains were still available to the German chemists. After Russia
had been won by the World Armies, the Germans for a time suffered
chronic nitrogen starvation, as they depended on the protium derived
from what remained of their agriculture and from the fisheries in the
Baltic. As the increasing bombardment from the air herded them within
their fast building armoured city, and drove them beneath the soil in
all other German territory and from the surface of the sea in the
Baltic; they must have perished miserably but for the discovery of a new
source of protium.
This source they had found in the uninhabited islands of the Arctic,
where the formation of the Ural Mountains extends beneath the sea.
Sending their submarines thence in search of platinum ores they had not
found platinum but a limited supply of ore containing the even more
valuable protium. By this traffic Germany had survived for a century and
a half. The quantity of the rare element needed was small, for its
effect, like that of radium, was out of all proportion to its bulk. But
this little they must have, and it seems that the supply of ore
was failing.
Nor was that all to interest me. How did the German submarine get to the
Arctic since the World State had succeeded, after half a century of
effort, in damming the Baltic by closing up several passes among the
Danish Islands and the main pass of the sound between Zealand and
Sweden? I remember, as a youngster, the great Jubilee that celebrated
the completion of that monumental task, and the joy that hailed from the
announcement that the world's shipping would at last be freed from an
ancient scourge.
But little had we of the world known the magnitude of the German fears
as the Baltic dam neared completion. We had thought merely to protect
our commerce from German piracy and perhaps to stop them from getting a
little copper and rubber in some remote corner of the earth. But we did
not realize that we were about to cut them off from an essential element
without which that conceited and defiant race must have speedily run up
the white flag of absolute surrender or have died to the last man, like
rats in a neglected trap.
But the completion of the Baltic dam evidently had not shut off the
supply of Arctic ore, for the annual importation of ore was given right
up to date though the Baltic had been closed for nearly a score of
years. Eagerly I searched my papers for an item that would give some
hint as to how the submarines got out of the dammed-up Baltic. But on
that point the documents before me were silent. They referred to the
Arctic ore, gave elaborate details as to mineralogy and geology of the
strata from which it came, but as to the ways of its coming into Berlin
there was not the slightest suggestion. That this ore must come by
submarine was obvious. If so, the submarine must be at large in the
Atlantic and Arctic seas, and those occasional reports of periscopes
sighted off the coast of Norway, which have never been credited, were
really true. The submarines, or at least their cargoes, must reach
Berlin by some secret passage. Here indeed was a master mystery, a
secret which, could I unravel it and escape to the outer world with the
knowledge, would put unconditionally within the power of the World State
the very life of the three hundred millions of this unholy race that was
bred and fed by science in the armoured City of Berlin, or that, working
like blind moles of the earth, held the world at bay from off the
sterile and pock-marked soil of all that was left of the one-time
German Empire.
That night I did not sleep till near the waking hour, and when the
breakfast container bumped into the receiving cupboard I was nodding
over the chemical papers amid strange and wonderful dreams.
~4~
Next day with three assistants, themselves chemists of no mean rank, I
set to work to prepare apparatus for repeating all the known processes
in the extraction and use of the rare and vital element. This work
absorbed me for many weeks, during which time I went nowhere and saw no
one and slept scarce one hour out of four.
But the steady application told upon me, and, by way of recreation, I
decided to spend an evening on the Level of Free Women, a place to
which, much though it fascinated me, I had not yet mustered the
courage to go.
My impression, as I stepped from the elevator, was much as that of a man
who alights from a train in a strange city on a carnival night. Before
me, instead of the narrow, quiet streets of the working and living
quarters of the city, there spread a broad and seemingly endless hall of
revelry, broken only by the massive grey pillars that held up the
multi-floored city. The place was thronged with men of varied ranks and
professions. But more numerous and conspicuous were the women, the first
and only women that I had seen among the Germans--the Free Women of
Berlin, dressed in gorgeous and daring costumes; women of whom but few
were beautiful, yet in whose tinted cheeks and sparkling eyes was all
the lure of parasitic love.
The multi-hued apparel of the throng dazzled and astonished me.
Elsewhere I had found a sterile monotony of dress and even of stature
and features. But here was resplendent variety and display. Men from all
the professional and military classes mingled indiscriminately, their
divers uniforms and decorations suggesting a dress ball in the capital
of the world. But the motley costumes of the women, who dressed with the
license of unrestrained individuality, were even more startling and
bizarre--a kaleidoscopic fantastic masquerade.
I wondered if the rule of convention and tyranny of style had lost all
hold upon these women. And yet I decided, as I watched more closely,
that there was not an absence of style but rather a warfare of styles.
The costumes varied from the veiled and beruffled displays, that left
one confounded as to what manner of creature dwelt therein, to the other
extreme of mere gaudily ornamented nudity. I smiled as I recalled the
world-old argument on the relative modesty of much or little clothing,
for here immodesty was competing side by side in both extremes, both
seemingly equally successful.
But it was not alone in the matter of dress that the women of the Free
Level varied. They differed even more strikingly in form and feature,
for, as I was later more fully to comprehend, these women were drawn
from all the artificially specialized breeds into which German science
had wrought the human species. Most striking and most numerous were
those whom I rightly guessed to be of the labour strain. Proportionally
not quite so large as the males of the breed, yet they were huge,
full-formed, fleshly creatures, with milky white skin for the most part
crudely painted with splashes of vermilion and with blued or blackened
brows. The garishness of their dress and ornament clearly bespoke the
poorer quality of their intellect, yet to my disgust they seemed fully
as popular with the men as the smaller and more refined types, evidently
from the intellectual strains of the race.
Happily these ungainly women of the labour strain were inclined to herd
by themselves and I hastened to direct my steps to avoid as much as
possible their overwhelming presence.
The smaller women, who seemed to be more nearly human, were even more
variegated in their features and make-up. They were not all blondes,
for some of them were distinctively dark of hair and skin, though
I was puzzled to tell how much of this was inborn and how much
the work of art. Another thing that astonished me was the wide
range of bodily form, as evidently determined by nutrition. Clearly
there was no weight-control here, for the figures varied from extreme
slenderness to waddling fatness. The most common type was that of mild
obesity which men call "plumpness," a quality so prized since the world
began that the women of all races by natural selection become relatively
fatter than men.
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