City of Endless Night
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Milo Hastings >> City of Endless Night
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The investigator made some notes on a pad.
"That is all for the present," he said. "I will refer your case to the
Chief."
Two days later I received an order to report at once to Dr. Ludwig
Zimmern, Chief of the Eugenic Staff.
The Chief, with whom I was soon cloistered, was a man of about sixty
years. His face revealed a greater degree of intelligence than I had yet
observed among the Germans, nor was his demeanour that of haughty
officiousness, for a kindly warmth glowed in his soft dark eyes.
"I have a report here," said Dr. Zimmern, "from my Investigator. He
recommends that your rights of paternity be revoked on the grounds that
he believes yours to be a case of atavistic radicalism. In short he
thinks you are rebellious by instinct, and that you are therefore unsafe
to father the coming generation. It is part of the function of this
office to breed the rebellious instinct out of the German race. What
have you to say in answer to these charges?"
"I do not want to seem rebellious," I stammered, "but I wish to be
relieved of this duty."
"Very well," said Zimmern, "you may be relieved. If you have no
objection I will sign the recommendation as it stands."
Surely, I thought, this man does not seem very bitter toward my
traitorous instincts.
Zimmern smiled and eyed me curiously. "You know," he said, "that to
possess a thought and to speak of it indiscreetly are two
different things."
"Certainly," I replied, emboldened by his words. "A man cannot do
original work in science if he possesses a mind that never thinks
contrary to the established order of things."
The clerks in the outer office must have thought my case a grievous one
for I was closeted with their chief for nearly an hour. Though our
conversation was vague and guarded, I knew that I had discovered in Dr.
Ludwig Zimmern, Chief of the Eugenic Staff, a man guilty himself of the
very crime of possessing rebellious instincts for which he had decided
me unfit to sire German children. And when I finally took my leave I
carried with me his private card and an invitation to call at his
apartment to continue our conversation.
~7~
In the weeks that followed, my acquaintance with the Chief of the
Eugenic Staff ripened rapidly into a warm friendship. The frank manner
in which he revealed his dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in
Germany pleased me greatly. Zimmern was interested in my chemical
researches and quickly comprehended their importance.
"I know so little of chemistry," he deplored, "yet on it our whole life
hangs. That is why I am so glad of an opportunity to talk to you. I do
not approve of so much ignorance of each other's work on the part of our
scientists. Our old university system was better. Then a scientist in
any field knew something of the science in all fields. But now we are
specialized from childhood. Take, for example, yourself. You are at work
on a great problem by which all of our labour stands to be undone if you
chemists do not solve it, and yet you do not understand how we will all
be undone. I think you should know more of what it means, then you will
work better. Is it not so?"
"Perhaps," I said, "but I have little time. I am working too hard now."
"Then," said Zimmern, "you should spend more time in pleasure on the
Free Level. Two days ago I conferred with the Emperor's Advisory Staff,
and I learned that grave changes are threatened. That is one reason I am
so interested in this protium on which you chemists are working. If you
do not solve this problem and replenish the food supply, the Emperor has
decided that the whole Free Level with its five million women must be
abolished. His Majesty will have no half-way measures. He is afraid to
take part of these women away, lest the intellectual workers rebel like
the labourers did in the last century when their women were taken away
piecemeal."
"But what will His Majesty do with these five million women?" I
inquired, eagerly desirous to learn more.
"Do? What can he do with the women?" exclaimed Dr. Zimmern in a low
pitched but vibrant voice. "He thinks he will make workers of them. He
does not seem to appreciate how specialized they are for pleasure. He
will make machine tenders of them to relieve the workmen, who are to be
made soldiers. He would make surface soldiers out of these blind moles
of the earth, put amber glasses on them and train them to run on the
open ground and carry the war again into the sunlight. It is folly,
sheer folly, and madness. His Majesty, I fear, reads too much of old
books. He always was historically inclined."
On a later occasion Zimmern gave me the broad outlines of the history of
German Eugenics.
"Our science of applied Eugenics," he said, "began during the Second
World War. Our scientists had long known that the same laws of heredity
by which plants and animals had been bred held true with man, but they
had been afraid to apply those laws to man because the religion of that
day taught that men had souls and that human life was something too
sacred to be supervised by science. But William III was a very fearless
man, and he called the scientists together and asked them to outline a
plan for the perfection of the German race.
"At first all they advocated was that paternity be restricted to the
superior men. This broke up the old-fashioned family where every man
chose his own wife and sired as many children as he liked. There were
great mutterings about that, and if we had not been at war, there would
have been rebellion. The Emperor told the people it was a military
necessity. The death toll of war then was great and there was urgent
need to increase the birth rate, so the people submitted and women soon
ceased to complain because they could no longer have individual
husbands. The children were supported by the state, and if they had
legitimate fathers of the approved class they were left in the mothers'
care. As all women who were normal and healthy were encouraged to bear
children, there was a great increase in the birth rate, which came near
resulting in the destruction of the race by starvation.
"As soon as a sufficient number of the older generation that had
believed in the religious significance of the family and marriage system
had died out, the ambitious eugenists set about to make other reforms.
The birth rate was cut down by restricting the privilege of motherhood
to a selected class of women. The other women were instructed in the
arts of pleasing man and avoiding maternity, and that is where we have
the origin of our free women. In those days they were free to associate
with men of all classes. Indeed any other plan would at first have been
impossible.
"A second fault was that the superior men for whom paternity was
permitted were selected from the official and intellectual classes. The
result was that the quality of the labourers deteriorated. So two
strains were established, the one for the production of the intellectual
workers, and the other for producing manual workers. From time to time
this specialization has increased until now we have as many strains of
inheritance as there are groups of useful characteristics known to be
hereditary.
"We have produced some effects," mused Zimmern, "which were not
anticipated, and which have been calling forth considerable criticism.
His Majesty sends me memorandums nearly every year, after he reviews the
maternity levels, insisting that the feminine beauty of the race is, as
a whole, deteriorating. And yet this is logical enough. With the
exception of our small actor-model strain, the characteristics for which
we breed have only the most incidental relation to feminine beauty. The
type of the labour female is, as you have seen, a buxom, fleshly beauty;
youth and full nutrition are essential to its display, and it soon fades.
In the scientific strains it seems that the power of original thought
correlates with a feminine type that is certainly not beautiful.
Doubtless not understanding this you may have felt that you were
discriminated against in your assignment. But the clerical mind
with its passion for monotonous repetition of petty mental processes
seems to correlate with the most exquisite and refined feminine
features. Those scintillating beauties on the Free Level who have
ever at their beck our wisest men are from our clerical strain,--but
of course they are only the rejects. It is unfortunate that you cannot
see the more privileged specimens in the clerical maternity level.
"But I digress to that which is of no consequence. The beauty of women is
unimportant but the number of women is very important. When some women
were specialized for motherhood then there were surplus women. At first
they made workers of them. The war was then conducted on a larger scale
than now. We had not yet fully specialized the soldier class. All the
young men went to war; and, when they came back and went to work, they
became bitterly jealous of the women workers and made an outcry that
those who could not fight should not work. The men workers drove the women
from industry, hoping thereby each to possess a mistress. As a result the
great number of unproductive women was a drain upon the state. All sorts
of schemes were proposed to reduce the number of female births but most of
these were unscientific. In studying the records it was found that the
offspring of certain men were predominantly males. By applying this
principle of selection we have, with successive generations, been able to
reduce the proportion of female births to less than half the old rate.
"But the sexual impulse of the labourers made them restless and
rebellious, and the support of the free women for these millions of
workers was a great economic waste. When animals had been bred to large
size and great strength their sexuality had decreased, while their power
as beasts of burden increased. The same principle applied to man has
resulted in more docile workers. By beginning with the soldiers and mine
workers, who were kept away from women, and by combining proper training
with the hereditary selection, we solved that problem and removed all
knowledge of women from the minds of the workmen."
"But how about paternity among the workers?" I asked.
"Those who are selected are removed to special isolated quarters. They
are told they are being taken to serve as His Majesty's body guard; and
they never go back to mingle with their fellows."
I then related for the doctor my conversation with the workman who asked
me about women.
"So," said Zimmern, "there has been a leak somewhere; knowledge is hard
to bottle. Still we have bottled most of it and the labourer accepts his
loveless lot. But it could not be done with the intellectual worker."
Dr. Zimmern smiled cynically. "At least," he added, "we don't propose to
admit that it can be done. And that, Col. Armstadt, is what I was
remarking about the other evening. Unless you chemists can solve the
protium problem, Germany must cut her population swiftly, if we do not
starve out altogether. His Majesty's plan to turn the workmen into
soldiers and make workers of the free women will not solve it. It is too
serious for that. The Emperor's talk about the day being at hand is all
nonsense. He knows and we know that these mongrel herds, as he calls the
outside enemy, are not so degenerate.
"We may have improved the German stock in some ways by our scientific
breeding, but science cannot do much in six generations, and what we
have accomplished, I as a member of the Eugenist Staff, can assure you
has really been attained as much by training as by breeding, though the
breeding is given the credit. Our men are highly specialized, and once
outside the walls of Berlin they will find things so different that this
very specialization will prove a handicap. The mongrel peoples are more
adaptable. Our workmen and soldiers are large in physique, but dwarfed
of intellect. The enemy will beat us in open war, and, even if we should
be victorious in war, we could not rule them. Either we solve this food
business or we all turn soldiers and go out into the blinding sunlight
and die fighting."
I ventured as a wild remark: "At least, if we get outside there will be
plenty of women."
The older man looked at me with the superiority of age towards youth.
"Young man," he said, "you have not read history; you do not understand
this love and family doctrine; it exists in the outside world today just
as it did two centuries ago. The Germans in the days of the old surface
wars made too free with the enemy's women, and that is why they ran us
into cover here and penned us up. These mongrel people will fight for
their women when they will fight for nothing else. We have not bred all
the lust out of our workmen either. It is merely dormant. Once they are
loosed in the outer world they will not understand this thing and they
will again make free with the enemy's women, and then we shall all be
exterminated."
Dr. Zimmern got up and filled a pipe with synthetic tobacco and puffed
energetically as he walked about the room. "What do you say about this
protium ore?" he asked; "will you be able to solve the problem?"
"Yes," I said, "I think I shall."
"I hope so," replied my host, "and yet sometimes I do not care; somehow
I want this thing to come to an end. I want to see what is outside there.
I think, perhaps, I would like to fly.
"What troubles me is that I do not see how we can ever do it. We have
bred and trained our race into specialization and stupidity. We wouldn't
know how to go out and join this World State if they would let us."
Dr. Zimmern paced the room in silence for a time. "Do you know," he
said, "I should like to see a negro, a black man with kinky hair--it
must be queer."
"Yes," I answered, "there must be many queer things out there."
CHAPTER VI
IN WHICH I LEARN THAT COMPETITION IS STILL
THE LIFE OF THE OLDEST TRADE IN THE WORLD
~1~
When I told Dr. Zimmern that I should solve the problem of the increase
of the supply of protium I may have been guilty of speaking of hopes as
if they were certainties. My optimism was based on the discovery that
the exact chemical state of the protium in the ore was unknown, and that
it did not exist equally in all samples of the ore.
After some further months of labour I succeeded in determining the exact
chemical ingredients of the ore, and from this I worked rapidly toward a
new process of extraction that would greatly increase the total yield of
the precious element. But this fact I kept from my assistants whose work
I directed to futile researches while I worked alone after hours in
following up the lead I had discovered.
During the progress of this work I was not always in the laboratory. I
had become a not infrequent visitor to the Level of the Free Women. The
continuous carnival of amusement had an attraction for me, as it must
have had for any tired and lonely man. But it was not merely the lure of
sensuous pleasures that appealed to me, for I was also fascinated with
the deeper and more tragic aspect of life beneath the gaudy surface of
hectic joy.
Some generalities I had picked up from observation and chance
conversations. As a primary essential to life on the level I had quickly
learned that money was needed, and my check book was in frequent demand.
The bank provided an aluminum currency for the pettier needs of the
recreational life, but neither the checks nor the currency had had value
on other levels, since there all necessities were supplied without cost
and luxuries were unobtainable. This strange retention of money
circulation and general freedom of personal conduct exclusively on the
Free Level puzzled me. Thus I found that food and drink were here
available for a price, a seeming contradiction to the strict limitations
of the diet served me at my own quarters. At first it seemed I had
discovered a way to defeat that limitation--but there was the weigher to
be considered.
It was a queer ensemble, this life in the Black Utopia of Berlin, a
combination of a world of rigid mechanistic automatism in the regular
routine of living with rioting individual license in recreational
pleasure. The Free Level seemed some ancient Bagdad, some Bourbon Court,
some Monte Carlo set here, an oasis of flourishing vice in a desert of
sterile law-made, machine-executed efficiency and puritanically ordered
life. Aided by a hundred ingenious wheels and games of chance, men and
women gambled with the coin and credit of the level. These games were
presided over by crafty women whose years were too advanced to permit of
a more personal means of extracting a living from the grosser passions
of man. Some of these aged dames were, I found, quite highly regarded
and their establishments had become the rendezvous for many younger
women who by some arrangement that I could not fathom plied their
traffic in commercialized love under the guidance of these subtler women
who had graduated from the school of long experience in preying
upon man.
But only the more brilliant women could so establish themselves for the
years of their decline. There were others, many others, whose beauty had
faded without an increase in wit, and these seemed to be serving their
more fortunate sisters, both old and young, in various menial
capacities. It was a strange anachronism in this world where men's more
weighty affairs had been so perfectly socialized, to find woman
retaining, evidently by men's permission, the individualistic right to
exploit her weaker sister.
The thing confounded me, and yet I recalled the well known views of our
sociological historians who held that it was woman's greater
individualism that had checked the socialistic tendencies of the world.
Had the Germans then achieved and maintained their rigid socialistic
order by retaining this incongruous vestige of feminine commercialism as
a safety valve for the individualistic instincts of the race?
They called it the Free Level, and I marvelled at the nature of this
freedom. Freedom for licentiousness, for the getting and losing of money
at the wheels of fortune, freedom for temporary gluttony and the mild
intoxication of their flat, ill-flavoured synthetic beer. A tragic
symbol it seemed to me of the ignobility of man's nature, that he will
be a slave in all the loftier aspects of living if he can but retain his
freedom for his vices and corruptions. Had the Germans then, like the
villain of the moral play, a necessary part in the tragedy of man; did
they exist to show the other races of the earth the way they
should not go? But the philosophy of this conception collapsed when I
recalled that for more than a century the world had lost all sight of
the villain and yet had not in the least deteriorated from a lack of the
horrible example.
From these vaguer speculations concerning the Free Level of Berlin that
existed like a malformed vestigial organ in the body of that socialized
state, my mind came back to the more human, more personal side of the
problem thus presented me. I wanted to know more of the lives of these
women who maintained Germany's remnant of individualism.
To what extent, I asked myself, have the true instincts of womanhood and
the normal love of man and child been smothered out of the lives of
these girls? What secret rebellions are they nursing in their hearts? I
wondered, too, from what source they came, and why they were selected
for this life, for Zimmern had not adequately enlightened me on
this point.
Pondering thus on the secret workings in the hearts of these girls, I
sat one evening amid the sensuous beauty of the Hall of Flowers. I
marvelled at how little the Germans seemed to appreciate it, for it was
far less crowded than were the more tawdry places of revelry. Here
within glass encircling walls, preserved through centuries of artificial
existence, feeding from pots of synthetic soil and stimulated by
perpetual light, marvellous botanical creations flourished and flowered
in prodigal profusion. Ponderous warm-hued lilies floated on the
sprinkled surface of the fountain pool. Orchids, dangling from the metal
lattice, hung their sensuous blossoms in vapour-laden air. Luxurious
vines, climatized to this unreal world, clambered over cosy arbours, or
clung with gripping fingers to the mossy concrete pillars.
~2~
I was sitting thus in moody silence watching the play of the fountain,
when, through the mist, I saw the lonely figure of a girl standing in
the shadows of a viny bower. She was toying idly with the swaying
tendrils. Her hair was the unfaded gold of youth. Her pale dress of
silvery grey, unmarred by any clash of colour, hung closely about a form
of wraith-like slenderness.
I arose and walked slowly toward her. As I approached she turned toward
me a face of flawless girlish beauty, and then as quickly turned away as
if seeking a means of escape.
"I did not mean to intrude," I said.
She did not answer, but when I turned to go, to my surprise, she stepped
forward and walked at my side.
"Why do you come here alone?" she asked shyly, lifting a pensive
questioning face.
"Because I am tired of all this tawdry noise. But you," I said, "surely
you are not tired of it? You cannot have been here long."
"No," she replied, "I have not. Only thirty days"; and her blue eyes
gleamed with childish pride.
"And that is why you seem so different from them all?"
Timidly she placed her hand upon my arm. "So you," she said gratefully,
"you understand that I am not like them-that is, not yet."
"You do not act like them," I replied, "and what is more, you act as if
you did not want to be like them. It surely cannot be merely that you
are new here. The other girls when they come seem so eager for this
life, to which they have long been trained. Were you not trained for
it also?"
"Yes," she admitted, "they tried to train me for it, but they could not
kill my artist's soul, for I was not like these others, born of a strain
wherein women can only be mothers, or, if rejected for that, come here.
I was born to be a musician, a group where women may be something more
than mere females."
"Then why are you here?" I asked.
"Because," she faltered, "my voice was imperfect. I have, you see, the
soul of an artist but lack the physical means to give that soul
expression. And so they transferred me to the school for free women,
where I have been courted by the young men of the Royal House. But of
course you understand all that."
"Yes," I said, "I know something of it; but my work has always so
absorbed me that I have not had time to think of these matters. In fact,
I come to the Free Level much less than most men."
For a moment, it seemed, her eyes hardened in cunning suspicion, but as
I returned her intent gaze I could fathom only the doubts and fears of
childish innocence.
"Please let us sit down," I said; "it is so beautiful here; and then
tell me all about yourself, how you have lived your childhood, and what
your problems are. It may be that I can help you."
"There is not much to tell," she sighed, as she seated herself beside
me. "I was only eight years old when the musical examiners condemned my
voice and so I do not remember much about the music school. In the other
school where they train girls for the life on the Free Level, they
taught us dancing, and how to be beautiful, and always they told us that
we must learn these things so that the men would love us. But the only
men we ever saw were the doctors. They were always old and serious and I
could not understand how I could ever love men. But our teachers would
tell us that the other men would be different. They would be handsome
and young and would dance with us and bring us fine presents. If we were
pleasing in their sight they would take us away, and we should each have
an apartment of our own, and many dresses with beautiful colours, and
there would be a whole level full of wonderful things and we could go
about as we pleased, and dance and feast and all life would be love and
joy and laughter.
"Then, on the 'Great Day,' when we had our first individual dresses--for
before we had always worn uniforms--the men came. They were young
military officers and members of the Royal House who are permitted to
select girls for their own exclusive love. We were all very shy at
first, but many of the girls made friends with the men and some of them
went away that first day. And after that the men came as often as they
liked and I learned to dance with them, and they made love to me and
told me I was very beautiful. Yet somehow I did not want to go with
them. We had been told that we would love the men who loved us. I don't
know why, but I didn't love any of them. And so the two years passed and
they told me I must come here alone. And so here I am."
"And now that you are here," I said, "have you not, among all these men
found one that you could love?"
"No," she said, with a tremor in her voice, "but they say I must."
"And how," I asked, "do they enforce that rule? Does any one require
you--to accept the men?"
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