They stood there. For long minutes they looked at each other. They did not touch hands. For was she not now betrothed to Foh Wong?
They turned and went their different ways. And a few days later Na Liu became the coolie’s bride, while Yang Shen-Li traveled south, to be a captain in a Manchu banner corps and rise high in the favor of the Dowager Empress.
NA LIU was a faithful wife to Foh Wong, since it was her duty; obeying the ancient maxim that a married woman must first widen her tolerance, then control the impulses of her heart and body, then entirely correct herself.
He was a good husband to her. Nor did the notion of her loving Yang Shen-Li—he knew it, though they never spoke of it—disturb his massive Mongol equanimity. Indeed, he was conscious of a keener tang and zest to his passion when he reflected that the other was an aristocrat and he himself a despised mud-turtle; yet his the woman who might have had her luxurious ease in a mandarin’s palace.
Still, there were moments when he was prey to a certain jealousy. Not jealousy of the flesh—how could that be, with Yang Shen-Li in Pekin and Na Liu so rigidly observing the conventions? Jealousy, rather, of the brain, the imagining; of the gnawing, recurrent idea that, married to his rival, Na Liu would have lived in splendor of silks and jade, while as his own wife, her life was sordid and mean and frugal.
He would reason, thereby doing her an injustice, that she compared her existence, such as it was, with what it might have been. And it was less through love of her, and more because of this jealousy—this avid longing for material achievement, for precious things to put at her feet, telling her, “Behold! I can give you whatever the Manchu could have given you!”—that ambition came to him, that he dreamed of rising from his lowly estate to power and riches.
It was about this time that a Ninguta man returned to his native town, his pockets clanking with gold and amazing tales on his lips of the fair fortune awaiting the men of China in a land beyond the Pacific. America was its fantastic and barbarous name. And it seemed that the work there was plentiful, and the wages generous and princely.
Foh Wong listened to him eagerly. He asked many astute, practical questions. Presently, he made up his mind.
He sold his meager belongings. He took Na Liu to Canton, and crowded there aboard a Yankee clipper with a gang of his countrymen. And even before the ship warped out, he received his first taste of the New World’s crass realities at the hands of the Gloucester mate, who, short of help, picked decidedly involuntary and as decidedly unpaid stevedores from among his Chinese passengers— forcing them to labor all day, to shift cumbersome freight, to direct to the derricks the heavy slings of cargo, to toil for long hours with bleeding fingers and tired, aching bodies. Once Foh Wong, taking a breathing spell, said to Na Liu, who stood by the gunwale:
“Ah—hard, hard work! But it does not matter. For I shall succeed. No doubt of it.” And in a whisper: “You want me to succeed?”
“Yes.”
“You love me—a little bit?”
Her reply was hopeless in its honesty, hopeless in what it did not say:
“I shall be a faithful wife to you—always.”
“But—”
He began to plead with her, when the
Gloucester mate’s bellow interrupted him:
“Cut out that Chinkie talk, yer yaller-skinned heathen—and git back to them derricks!”
And though Foh Wong did not understand the words, he had no trouble in understanding the length of knotted rope that whistled through the air.
Such was the beginning of his odyssey—which was destined to end, ironically, in a sweltering Pell Street garret, with the door locked and the windows tightly shuttered, and an agony of fear forever stewing in his soul. The beginning of his odyssey— almost as bitter as this same end—with all about him, stretching east toward San Francisco, the world of the sea, enigmatic and alien.
Slimy, brutish toil. Seasickness and wretched food and brackish water. The Gloucester mate cuffing and cursing him and his countrymen with a certain austere Puritan determination. Days with the waves house-high under a puffed and desolate sky. Nights of blackness flecked with white, and running back to a yet deeper blackness. Once a gale that shivered a mast into matchwood and swept the bridges clean as with a knife.
He was conscious of fear. But paradoxically, he was not afraid of his fear. For there was his ambition. There was his passion for Na Liu. There was, stronger than his passion, his hate of Yang Shen-Li. These sustained him too through the decades of heavy labor that followed.
First in California—California of the smashing, roaring, epic era. Gold was king then. Silver-lead was viceroy. Everywhere railroads were being pushed. There was timber. There was wheat. There were cattle ranches and orchards. There was the White Man’s bragging:
“Give us the dollar! To hell with the cents! Let the Yellow Men earn ‘em!”
The Yellow Men did. Among them, Foh
Wong—striving desperately, year after year, living close to the danger line of starvation, in California, Arizona, Colorado, Chicago, at last reaching New York. Frugally hoarding his money, climbing up the ladder of success, until his was a name for shrewdness and solid riches to conjure with in Chinatown, and stout merchants, sipping their tea or smoking their opium-pipes on an afternoon at the Azure Dragon Club, would comment admiringly:
“Gold comes to his hand unasked—like a dog or a courtesan.”
Pell Street Blues Chapter 2
Never, through the decades, though for years they did not see one another, did the hate of
these two weaken.
It stretched, hard and stark and blighting, athwart the full span of both their lives. It followed the churned steamship lane to San Francisco and Seattle. It traveled thence across the continent to New York—there to abut and peak to a grim, rather fantastic climax in the maze and reek and riot of half a dozen tired old streets that, a few blocks away from the greasy drab of the river, cluster toward the Bowery, toward the pride of the Wall Street mart, as far even as busy, bartering, negligent Broadway.
Streets of Chinatown, squatting turgid and sardonic and tremendously alien! Not caring a tinker’s dam for the White Man’s world roaring its up-to-date, efficient steel-and-concrete symphony on all sides.
Rickety, this Chinatown; moldy and viscous, not over-clean, smelling distressingly of sewer gas and rotting vegetables and sizzling, rancid fat. Yet a fact to be reckoned with in Gotham’s kaleidoscopic pattern. A cultural and civil entity not without dignity. A thing aloof, apart, slightly supercilious—and intensely human. And being human, a fit background for a tragic tale. . . .
Not that this tale is entirely tragic. For tragedy, no less than comedy, is after all only a matter of viewpoint, perhaps of race and religion—two accidents whose sum-total spells prejudice.
Therefore, if your sense of humor be faintly oblique, faintly Oriental, in other words, you may derive a certain amusement from the thought of Foh Wong, no longer a coolie but a prosperous New York merchant, cooped up in the sweltering garret of his Pell Street house, with the door locked and the windows tightly shuttered, and an agony of fear forever stewing in his brain. You may also laugh at the idea of Yang Shen-Li lording it gloriously over Foh Wong’s Cantonese clerks, spending Foh Wong’s money with a free and reckless hand—and in the evening, after a pleasant hour or two at the Azure Dragon Club over an archaic mandarin gambling game of “Patting Green Butterflies” or “Ladies on Horseback” or “Heighoh! Flies the Kite,” mounting to the second floor of the Pell Street house, there to bow courteously before Na Liu, his wrinkled old wife, once the wife of Foh Wong! She would be sitting stiffly erect, in the proper Chinese manner, on a chair of ebony and lacquer encrusted with rose-quartz, her tiny feet barely touching the floor and her hands demurely folded; and Yang Shen-Li would say to her:
“Moonbeam, was there ever love as staunch as ours?”
She would give a quaint, giggling, girlish little laugh.
“Never, O Great One!” she would reply.
“Never!” he would echo. “The same love until death—may it not be for many years! The same love that came to you and me, so long ago, when the world was young back home in Ninguta—and
we were young—”
“And you the iron-capped prince—and I the gardener’s daughter!”
“But all the world to me—as you are today.”
“For the sake of my love,” she said with a queer triumph,
“—I shall marry another!”
Always, as often as he spoke the words, he made a great gesture with his strong, hairy hand. A gesture that cleaved the trooping shadows in the room with a certain brutality, that brushed through the sudden, clogged stillness like a conjurer’s wand, sweeping away the dust and grime of Pell Street, the dust and grime of the dead years, and calling up the cool, scented spring sweetness of the small Manchu-Chinese border town where both had lived and loved. . . .
He remembered as clearly as if it were yesterday how, on that morning after his talk with Foh Wong, he met Na Liu where they always met, in back of the Temple of the Monkey and the Stork, in the shelter of the enameled pagoda roof that mirrored the sun a thousand-fold, like intersecting rainbows, endless zigzag flashings of rose and purple and blue and green. There he told her what had happened, told her the full bitter tale; and he said to her as he had to Foh Wong:
“I do not fear death. But there is the honor of my father to be considered—the honor of my ancestors for countless generations.”
“Pah!” she cried. “And what do I care for the honor of your father, the honor of all your noble ancestors? It is you I care for. You alone. And the thought of you dead—why, I cannot bear it. Because, you see”—her voice was thin and
brittle—“I love you.” He was silent.
“I love you so,” she continued. “There is nothing, nothing, nothing I would not do for the sake of my love. Ah”—in a tense whisper—“for the sake of my love, I would lie, I would steal, I would kill! For the sake of my love”—more loudly, with a queer triumph in her accents—“I shall marry
another!”
He sighed. He spoke dully:
“The book has been read. The grape has been pressed. There is no more. This is the end of our love.”
“The end? No, no! There can be no end to our love, as there was no beginning. Why—don’t you see?—our love is a fact. A fact!”
He weighed the thought in his mind. Then he inclined his head.
“That is so,” he replied. “A fact, like the living Buddha, eternal and unchangeable. A fact, whatever may happen to you and to me!”
Pell Street Blues Chapter 1
Fate wrote the first chapter of this tale some centuries ago, when it planted the seeds of mutual hate in two kindred Mongol races: in Chinese and in Manchu, and by the same token, in patient, earthbound peasant and in hawkish nomad, hard-galloping across the land, conquering it with the swish of the red sword, the scream and bray of the long-stemmed war-trumpets, the hollow nasal drone of the kettle-drums—and overhead, the carrion-fed vultures paralleling the marauders’ progress on eager wings.
Fate wrote the second chapter sixty-odd years ago, when Foh Wong and Yang Shen-Li were boys in the cold northern town of Ninguta, where they threw stones at each other and swapped salty abuse; although it was Yang Shen-Li, the Manchu, the mandarin’s son, who did most of the stonethrowing, whereas Foh Wong, whose parents were Chinese coolies tilling the barren clay, did most of the cursing—from a safe distance. For he valued his skin—which, together with his shrewd brain, was his sole possession.
Fate wrote the third chapter a little over fifty years ago, when parlous times had come to China—with Russia at the western and Japan at the eastern border, both waiting for an excuse to invade the tottering Empire and tear it to pieces—and when, one morning, Foh Wong stopped Yang
Shen-Li on the street and said:
“A word with you!”
“What is it, mud-turtle?”
“Indeed,” replied the other, “I am no more than a mud-turtle, while you are an aristocrat, an ironcapped prince. And yet”—slowly—“today I have the whip-hand.”
“Eh?” exclaimed Yang Shen-Li.
He was startled. He wondered if Foh Wong knew, how he knew—heard him drop his voice to a purr:
“You were not alone last night. I watched from behind a tree. And should I proclaim what I saw, there would be your handsome head spiked on a tall pole in front of the Palace of August Justice.”
The Manchu shrugged his shoulders. He tried to speak casually:
“I do not fear death.”
“Of course not—since you are a brave fool. But being also an honorable fool, you would not wish to bring black disgrace on your father, to cause him to lose face. And—forgive the wretched pun—your father would lose a great deal of face, if you should lose your head. A murderer’s head—”
“I did not murder.”
“You killed.”
“In self-defense. He insulted me, struck me, drew his revolver and fired—the insolent
foreigner!”
“But—be pleased to remember—a most important foreigner. A high Russian official whose corpse you—ah—buried in back of Han Ma’s camel stables.” He stabbed out an accusing finger.
“I saw you.”
“Have you witnesses?”
“Not a one. I was alone.”
“Then?”
“There will be witnesses, when the time comes.
Three of my cousins. A dozen, if you prefer.”
“Lying witnesses!”
“Lying, only, in swearing they saw the deed. Not lying as to the deed itself. And though you are a mandarin’s son, the Dowager Empress, with Russia’s soldiers massed at the frontier, will give an order to her red-robed executioners, will have your handsome head removed, if I should—”
“IS there a price for your silence, coolie?” interrupted Yang Shen-Li.
“Is there not a price for everything?”
“How much?”
“No money. Not a single silver tael.” Foh Wong paused. “The price of my silence is—a word.”
“A word?”
“Yes. A mere word from you—to Na Liu. A word telling her I desire her greatly—wish her to be my wife.”
“But”—the Manchu stammered with rage— “she—”
“Loves you? I know. And I know, too, that, loving you, she will not relish the thought of your bleeding head grinning down at her from a tall pole, and will therefore marry me, the mud-turtle. . . . Hayah!” with sudden violence. “Go to her! At once!
For today I command, and you will obey!” Yang Shen-Li stared at the other.
“Yes,” he said heavily. “I shall obey.” He took a step nearer. “But—listen to me, coolie!” His words clicked and broke like dropping icicles. “I hate you. Ah—by the Buddha!—I shall always hate you.”
“You hate me no more than I hate you,” was the answer. “But”—and Foh Wong’s eyes gleamed triumphantly through meager almond lids—“you are helpless, O paper tiger with paper teeth. I am not. So—keep on hating me!”
City of the Living Dead CHAPTER V A Drastic Experiment
“‘THIS was the situation when the growth of the adventure associations began to threaten the basis of organized government. For the adventure associations promoted disorder among those very elements of the people who should most desire security. The head of a great food company, for example, was involved in an adventure. In the course of it he was attacked by several men who struck at him with clubs. One of them struck a trifle too hard; the food company head was killed, and his company suffered from it.
“‘In an evil hour, some scientist suggested to the New Zealand government that the people should be offered plays they could witness through their optic nerves, and thus experience them as actual. This would be a substitute for the adventures of the associations. The government accepted the suggestion. It would necessitate removing the eyes of the subjects, and providing them with photo-sensitive cells. A man who trusts his whole life to an adventure association would certainly be willing to submit to the slight inconvenience of seeing through a mask instead of through his eyes for the rest of his life.
“‘At first there was no great rush on the part of the people to accept the operation. A few did so, and gave glowing accounts of the results; but to submit to an operation whose results would be permanent for the sake of a few hours or even days of visual pleasure did not appeal to the majority. But it was at once apparent that if electrical impulses could be arranged so that the subject would see things that were not in existence, others could be similarly arranged to reach the senses of smell, and even of feeling, taste or what you will. Like the original operation on the eyes, the process of development was slow; it was over a hundred years from the time when the New Zealand government first offered its citizens operations on the eyes to the date when the completed Adventure Machines such as you have seen were produced in all their complexity. The type of electrical impulse to produce the desired sensation on every nerve had first to be found, then applied, and finally woven into a complex record to be placed in a Machine with other records to provide the Machine Adventurer with a complete series of sensations.
“‘THE final process was that the subject was operated upon by skilled surgeons.
Every nerve in the body was laid bare, one after another; eyes, ears, nerves of feeling and taste, nerves of motion. To each was attached the tiny silver wire, and each was given the atomic treatment, then led down with the others to form a cable. During the first part of the operation the subject was placed under anaesthesia, but at the end, until his record was connected up, he experienced no sensations at all; he merely existed in an inert state, devoid of animation or feeling.
“‘As one set of nerves after another yielded its secrets to the scientists, the government Adventure Machines began to grow popular. They had enormous advantages over the adventure associations. The associations offered personal adventure that was often deadly; the Government Machines were absolutely safe. The adventure associations were costly; the Government device cost nothing, for when the subject submitted to the operation he was regarded by the courts as legally dead and his property passed to the Government. The adventure associations could offer only violent, physical adventures; the Government method could give the adventurer whatever he wanted. They could enable him to get the most out of life in whatever way he wished, for records of every sort were prepared, suited to the psychology of the individual.
“‘Thus if the operator wished to make the Adventurer feel that he was hunting, the record of a hunting adventure was placed in the Machine, and the cable leading from the adventurer’s nerves was connected to it. The nerves of the adventurer’s foot would assure him that he trod the mould of the forest; the nerves of his eyes would bring him a vision of the dim vista of trunks and a wild animal bounding through them; the nerves of his hands and arms would tell him he was making the correct motions to take aim and bring the animal down; and through the nerves of his ears, the Machine Adventurer would hear the dying scream of the beast he had slaughtered.
“‘THESE records are of an immense complexity; all the lower stories of this building are filled with them. It would not have done to make them too simple, for in that case the Machine Adventurer would have done better to have joined one of the associations. As it was, the Machine Adventurer chose his general type of adventure; his psychological charts, made when he was young, showed the type of mind he possessed, and what his reactions would be in certain cases. With the charts and his choice before them, the Government operators would lay out a course of adventures for him, and after the operation, he would pass through them in succession. There was a large number of adventures to choose from. Did he, for instance, wish to know what the distant planets looked like? In that case he would be given an adventure in which he was the head of an expedition. Under the spell of the Machine he gathered men and materials; with his own hands he worked on a space ship; he saw friends and companions about him, and all his senses reeled to the shock as his ship sprang away from the earth. He even felt that he ate and drank during the trip, for the nerves of taste and digestion were connected up as well as the others. At last he saw the new planet he was to visit swimming in the skies, larger and larger, as his ship approached it.
“‘You see the advantages? Men could achieve anything by this means; they could have the experience of accomplishing not only everything possible in actual life, but a great many things that actual life never holds even for the most fortunate. They could, if they were of the proper type, return to the cave-man period of existence and bounce over the hummocky moss in pursuit of the hairy rhinoceros, or float as disembodied spirits down endless corridors of an artificial Nirvana.
“‘IN fact, there was but one thing the
Machine Adventurer could not do: he could not return to the world. For the operations, once undergone, were practically irreversible. They involved, as I have said, laying bare every nerve of the body and by atomic bombardment making it an integral part of the silver wire that carried the false messages of sensation to it. To reverse the operation would naturally leave the returned Machine Adventurer deaf, dumb, blind and helpless, a mere living jelly. But nobody wished to return. The Adventure Houses, like this one, contained a vast store of records; the adventurers themselves were practically immortal and merely passed the rest of their days in a series of pleasing and thrilling experiences that always ended happily. Some of the more complex adventures, like those in which the subjects found themselves in the rôles of world conquerors, lasted over a period of years, and as soon as one was ended, the operators in the offices of the Adventure Houses switched the subject onto a new adventure.
“‘People readily abandoned the outside world in which everything was rapidly becoming dead. The adventure associations died as quickly as they had been born. After all, the majority of men and nearly all women soon tired of the crude excitements these adventure associations provided. In a short time whole groups of people undertook Machine Adventures; and the world’s population, which had been rising ever since the apes first descended from their trees, began to fall.
“‘At this point the very scientists who had developed the Machines began to become alarmed at the great rush of people to use them. They advised the destruction of the machines and the substitution of some other method of providing thrills and adventures. But the governments of the world, successful and peaceful and secure as no governments had ever been before, turned their backs on the scientists and built more and greater Adventure Houses. The scientists attempted to appeal to the people over the heads of the governments. The people laughed at them; and the governments paid no attention until one group of Oriental scientists, more devoted or less prudent than the rest, destroyed the great Adventure House at Chien-po by concentrating destructive rays upon it. This roused the governments to action; they rounded up all the disagreeing scientists and instead of executing them, forcibly operated upon them and placed them in Adventure Houses.
“‘The battle was a losing one on the side of the scientists from the start. One after another they grew old and abandoned the hopeless struggle, preferring themselves to enter the Adventure House and have a couch of ease and pleasant experiences.
“‘I cannot, I am afraid, picture for you the universal decay of every kind of life save that furnished by the Adventure Machines. Adventure Machines for even the little children were produced. . . . After while it became difficult to find operators for the Machines; cities and towns were practically depopulated. Even the black barbarians succumbed, for they had their Adventure Machines as the white men had theirs. In the Machines, be he never so fond of the pleasures of life, every man found every pleasure enhanced to the nth degree. The glutton, the drunkard, the man mad over women found here his own special paradise. Everything else became
useless . . .’
The Demon Power
ITH these words,” continued Hal
Halstrom, looking over the hall, “the voice of the man with the metal face trailed off and he sat babbling in his chair like one grown mad. So I even let him babble on, while I sat in silence. And after a time he rose and prepared meat for us and we did eat.
“But still some doubts and questions troubled my mind, how such things could be; and I asked him: ‘How came it that you escaped to tell this tale?’
“‘I did not escape,’ he said, touching the metal mask that covered all his face. ‘Don’t you see this? It is the badge of my own servitude to the Machines. I, no less than the rest, underwent the operation. And oh, the delight of it! For I was born by the shore of the sea, and in my adventure I swam forever among the green depths and saw strange monsters. I would willingly have been left there. But a day came when the last of the operators of this Adventure House died, and the three surgeons, who were all that were left, took me from the Machine and brought me back to this cruel world, for I was in those days an engineer and they needed me to operate the Machine. For my eyes they gave me these Machines, for my ears other Machines, and the tips of my hands and feet—all, all, I am a Machine! The mark of the Machine is on me. . . .’
“He cried these last words so wildly that I was fearful he might again fall into his insensate babbling. So I broke in upon him. ‘But these Adventurers,’ I asked, ‘how do they eat?’ “His lip curled with scorn of my ignorance. ‘In truth,’ he said, ‘you are a barbarian of the early ages that do not know of the D’Arsonval diathermic method. Know then, that among the silver wires on each Adventurer’s leg is clamped the end of an electric circuit, and at such times as meals are necessary, they are given electric meals of low and high frequency currents. I tell you because you ask, not because you will
understand.”
“‘Ah,’ I said, for in truth I did not understand. ‘And what is your work here?’
“‘I change the adventures and see that the machinery does not break down.’
“‘But there are thousands of the living dead above. Do you change all the adventures as they run through them?’
“The man with the metal face hesitated and stammered as one in embarrassment I am supposed to,’ he said finally, ‘but I am all alone now. It is too much. These few—he waved his hand at the board on the wall, ‘were friends of mine once, and their adventures I change.’
“‘But what makes the Machines run?’ I asked, seeing that he was cast down and wishing to draw him from his thoughts.
“‘Power,’ said he. And then I shuddered, for I knew in good truth that I was in the very lair of that Demon.
“‘But where does Power come from, and who is he?’ I asked, as boldly as I might.
“For answer he took me by the hand and led me out of the room and down a dizzy flight of iron stairs—down—down—to the very bowels of the earth. Finally he stopped and pointed. I saw a long shaft with a ruddy glow far at the base, and as I leaned over the iron rail a pebble that had somehow caught in my pocket tinkled from it against the rail and fell downward. I never heard it strike.
“‘There is the source of Power!’ cried the man with the metal face. ‘The earth’s central heat—for this world is fiery-hot at its core, and our scientists learned long ago how to tap it. I doubt me not that the first tapping was one reason why the mountain rose against your dale.’
WITH that we fell into conversation on this thing and that, and I stayed with
him for many days.
“In the end I was fain to return to my own place, but knew not how to surmount the Mountain of the South again, so I begged the man with the metal face to help me out of the wisdom of the Anglesk.
“He thought on it for a time and said that he would help me, but when he would show me how to escape over the mountain by means of Power, I refused. So he thought out another plan, and offered to show me how to build these wings we now use, on condition that I do a certain thing for him—namely, take him with me so that he might look again upon the faces of living men and women, and hear them talk. I agreed to this and thereupon we left the living dead to repeat eternally their empty adventures.
“The man with the metal face was stricken by the brilliance of the day when outside, and not a little overcome at the appearance of those mighty towers. Yet the thought of meeting living people sustained him and he showed me the trick of these wings, calling them gilders, and training me in their use until I could fly with them, both fast and far, soaring down the currents of the wind like a bird. Thereupon we set out for the Mountain of the South and for Alvrosdale.
“BUT ere we reached the place, the man with the metal face sickened and died; for we had exhausted such of his food as he brought with him from the tower, and the flesh of sheep and swine was over-rough fare for him, So perished the last of the Anglesk, and on his death he gave me this Machine with a voice, which he called an ‘alarum clock,’ to be a perpetual memento of the terror of Machines and the folly of the Anglesk.
“The man with the metal face I buried by a pile of stones, then buckled my wings to my back and soared away.
“But when I returned to Alvrosdale bearing on my back the wings that were the proof of my tale, there was great hurry and bustle, and many would have taken the eagles’ causeway outward as I had taken it inward, for in those days the dale was so crowded with folk that many could not have good fortune. Nevertheless the land would lie fallow if all went, or even a great part, and some must remain behind to care for those who returned broken in spirit or in body. Therefore this ceremony and the examinations through which you have passed were instituted. Each year the dale chooses of its best and boldest, and to them is told the tale you have heard before they start on the long journey. Now I leave you—and good luck attend your flight; but bear in mind that the villages and Machines of the Anglesk are accursed and belong to the living dead until their towers shall topple to the ground. Farewell.”
With these words the old man sat down as one exhausted with long speech and with the memory of the trials and terrors of the past.
The dawn was streaking palely along the eastern windows of the Hall of Assembly, as the hearers of the tale arose and made their way gravely to the door.
In the doorway each was met by one who gave him a scrip of food, a pair of skis and a set of wings, and one after another they spun down the snowy hill, away from the Hall, to gather speed and finally to soar aloft in the clear wintry dawn, over the Mountain of the South, out into the dead world, with their cargo of new hopes and fears and aspirations.
City of the Living Dead CHAPTER IV Adventure is Dead
“‘BUT why tell you more? You have heard enough to understand that art, the last refuge of men of leisure, was destroyed by the very Machines that gave man the leisure to enjoy art. . . . So it was with everything. Adventure of all kinds died. The last depths in the earth were plumbed, the last mountains were climbed or flown over by the might of the Machines. Men even made Machines to travel to the other planets that circle around the sun; they went to them, found them all inhospitably hot, cold or airless.
“‘And even here the Machines did away with all those occupations which provide adventure; for adventure is always the outcome of some lawless act, and the scientists had eliminated lawlessness by eliminating criminals soon after the coming of universal peace. Machines tested every child psychologically and supplied the proper remedies to make him a good citizen. . . .
“‘You must picture, my barbarian friend, a world in which Machines had deprived men not only of labor, but of amusement, of adventure, of excitement—in short, of everything that makes life worth while. Oh they were terrible days of boredom! What was left? Only the frantic pursuit of artificial pleasures. And men did pursue pleasure to a degree which seems fantastic to even me. Men became connoisseurs of odors, of clothes; I, even I, have spent a month’s income on a new perfume, and a thousand dollars for a single piece of cloth of original design. . . . But even here the Machines followed us, doing things better than we. We had nothing but leisure—endless, meaningless leisure.
“‘THEN the institution of Adventure
Insurance arose. It began with a
Japanese named Hatsu Yotosaki, who was hired to furnish new amusement—‘thrills’ they called it— to a party of rich Australians who had gone on an extended air voyage over Antarctica. This Jap conceived the idea of letting each member of the party know, indirectly, that some other one of the party was a criminal lunatic who was scheming to murder him. Long before their six months’ cruise was up, they were all eyeing each other with suspicion and fright, prowling about the corridors of the airship at night and doing all the things men do under the influence of fear. Three of them were even killed by mistake.
“‘When they got back to Melbourne,
Yotosaki told the survivors the story of how he had manufactured their fear and fright. Instead of jailing him for murder, they hailed him as a deliverer, the founder of a new idea. The idea was taken up with enthusiasm, and everywhere men were hired by others to involve them in wild and impossible, often bloody, adventures.
“‘But even here the scientists tried to intervene with their Machines. Why, they argued, go to all this trouble and expense to provide adventures for oneself, when one could obtain them second-hand by attending the mechanized theatres? The answer of the public was that the second-hand adventures of the theater were insipid, being without the element of personal contact; they gave the spectator none of the personal thrill that is part of a real adventure. This led to the formation of great companies to furnish adventures to people.
“‘Now the governments of the world grew worried, for with the coming of universal freedom from labor, pleasure and its pursuit had become the main concern of government. They accordingly set the scientists to work to find an antidote to the adventure companies, which had succeeded in eluding government control . . . The result is what you see! This building and these people that you call the living dead.
“It did not come all at once, young man. You see only the finished product. At first the scientists sought only to make their mechanized theaters more perfect. They had already perfected sound and motion in the early ages; to this was now added a device that added the sense of smell; if the pictured story was laid in a woodland the scent of piny branches swept through the audience, and if at sea, there was the tang of the salt spray.
“‘But the people tired of these shows; they came and were amused for once, but never came again. The scientists then produced the sensations of heat and cold—people went to winter pictures wrapped in furs as though for a trip to the arctic regions; vast artificial winds stormed through the theaters to the tune of the swaying boughs in the pictures; clouds of smoke and tongues of veritable burning flame were rolled out over the audience; and at last devices were introduced which gave the sitters gentle electrical shocks at emotional moments in the performances.
“‘And now came the great discovery. It happened that a man had had his hand cut off in an accident. It had been the custom previously to provide such unfortunates with artificial limbs of marvelous ingenuity and dexterity. Now the man’s surgeon, whose name was Brightman, suggested a metal hand which should be controlled by silver wires; and that the ends of the silver wires should be drawn out exceedingly fine, and attached to the nerves controlling the motions of the fingers. The nerves of the body are themselves like wires; they carry the messages of the brain to the muscles and of the muscles back to the brain. What Brightman was proposing was that the brain should deliver its message to the artificial metal nerves, thus causing the metal hand to move as a live hand would. It was his theory that all nervous impulses are delivered by electrical means, and if this was true the process would work.
“‘THE theory was not new, nor the idea; but previously there had been lacking any means to connect the metal wires to the nerves. This time it was done by the process discovered for building up human protoplasm; the connection between the silver wire and the nerve was made; it was placed in an electrical bath and given an atomic bombardment; and behold! the connecting end of the silver wire became itself a nerve wire of the same material as the rest of the nerve!
“‘Thus the plan worked—at first not well nor rapidly, but it worked. And as it was tried in succeeding cases, it worked better and better until a perfect artificial hand could be produced that was as good as a new one. . . . The next step came when the plan was applied to a man who had hopelessly lost his sight. Back of each eye is one of these nerves, which carries the message of what you see to the brain. For this man they made a new pair of eyes, fitted with machines called photo-sensitive cells, such as those I bear on my own face. In them is a marvel-metal called potassium, which, when light falls upon it, changes in resistance to an electrical current. Thus, for every speck of light there was a change in the electrical current that ran through the Machine, and the change was communicated to one of a net of wires, which in turn communicated it to the nerve of the eye. Then the man, though without eyes, could see!
“‘In time, this grew to be the common treatment for those who had lost their eyes, just as mechanical hands and feet replaced those members. And to one of our scientists (Professor Bruce) there came a new idea: If a man could by these means see what really happened, why should he not see also things that have never occurred? . . . Do you understand?
“‘After a long experimentation Bruce found that if the photo-sensitive cell of a blind man were removed, and the silver wires that led to his optic nerve were attached to other wires, electrical currents could be sent down these other wires that would make him see things that were not actually there at all.
“‘All this was before the adventure associations sprang up. At the time these associations came into being, the scientists had achieved so high a state of perfection with the device of providing blind persons with sights they did not actually see, that the result was, the blind could be made to see almost anything, even a whole series of nonexistent events.