The eternal moment, and other stories
thrice she felt the delirium of acquiescence. Her ritual performed,
she turned to page 1367, which gave the times of the departure of the
air-ships from the island in the southern hemisphere, under whose soil
she lived, to the island in the northern hemisphere, whereunder lived
her son.
She thought, "I have not the time."
She made the room dark and slept; she awoke and made the room light;
she ate and exchanged ideas with her friends, and listened to music
and attended lectures; she made the room dark and slept. Above her,
beneath her, and around her, the Machine hummed eternally; she did not
notice the noise, for she had been born with it in her ears. The earth,
carrying her, hummed as it sped through silence, turning her now to the
invisible sun, now to the invisible stars. She awoke and made the room
light.
"Kuno!"
"I will not talk to you," he answered, "until you come."
"Have you been on the surface of the earth since we spoke last?"
His image faded.
Again she consulted the book. She became very nervous and lay back
in her chair palpitating. Think of her as without teeth or hair.
Presently she directed the chair to the wall, and pressed an unfamiliar
button. The wall swung apart slowly. Through the opening she saw a
tunnel that curved slightly, so that its goal was not visible. Should
she go to see her son, here was the beginning of the journey.
Of course she knew all about the communication-system. There was
nothing mysterious in it. She would summon a car and it would fly with
her down the tunnel until it reached the lift that communicated with
the air-ship station: the system had been in use for many, many years,
long before the universal establishment of the Machine. And of course
she had studied the civilisation that had immediately preceded her
own--the civilisation that had mistaken the functions of the system,
and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing
things to people. Those funny old days, when men went for change of air
instead of changing the air in their rooms! And yet--she was frightened
of the tunnel: she had not seen it since her last child was born. It
curved--but not quite as she remembered; it was brilliant--but not
quite as brilliant as a lecturer had suggested. Vashti was seized with
the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and
the wall closed up again.
"Kuno," she said, "I cannot come to see you. I am not well."
Immediately an enormous apparatus fell on to her out of the ceiling, a
thermometer was automatically inserted between her lips, a stethoscope
was automatically laid upon her heart. She lay powerless. Cool pads
soothed her forehead. Kuno had telegraphed to her doctor.
So the human passions still blundered up and down in the Machine.
Vashti drank the medicine that the doctor projected into her mouth, and
the machinery retired into the ceiling. The voice of Kuno was heard
asking how she felt.
"Better." Then with irritation: "But why do you not come to me
instead?"
"Because I cannot leave this place."
"Why?"
"Because, any moment, something tremendous may happen."
"Have you been on the surface of the earth yet?"
"Not yet."
"Then what is it?"
"I will not tell you through the Machine."
She resumed her life.
But she thought of Kuno as a baby, his birth, his removal to the public
nurseries, her one visit to him there, his visits to her--visits which
stopped when the Machine had assigned him a room on the other side of
the earth. "Parents, duties of," said the book of the Machine, "cease
at the moment of birth. P. 422327483." True, but there was something
special about Kuno--indeed there had been something special about
all her children--and, after all, she must brave the journey if he
desired it. And "something tremendous might happen." What did that
mean? The nonsense of a youthful man, no doubt, but she must go. Again
she pressed the unfamiliar button, again the wall swung back, and she
saw the tunnel that curved out of sight. Clasping the Book, she rose,
tottered on to the platform, and summoned the car. Her room closed
behind her: the journey to the northern hemisphere had begun.
Of course it was perfectly easy. The car approached and in it she
found arm-chairs exactly like her own. When she signalled, it stopped,
and she tottered into the lift. One other passenger was in the lift,
the first fellow creature she had seen face to face for months. Few
travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the
earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the
previous civilisation had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself.
What was the good of going to Pekin when it was just like Shrewsbury?
Why return to Shrewsbury when it would be just like Pekin? Men seldom
moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.
The air-ship service was a relic from the former age. It was kept up,
because it was easier to keep it up than to stop it or to diminish
it, but it now far exceeded the wants of the population. Vessel after
vessel would rise from the vomitories of Rye or of Christchurch (I use
the antique names), would sail into the crowded sky, and would draw up
at the wharves of the south--empty. So nicely adjusted was the system,
so independent of meteorology, that the sky, whether calm or cloudy,
resembled a vast kaleidoscope whereon the same patterns periodically
recurred. The ship on which Vashti sailed started now at sunset, now
at dawn. But always, as it passed above Rheims, it would neighbour the
ship that served between Helsingfors and the Brazils, and, every third
time it surmounted the Alps, the fleet of Palermo would cross its track
behind. Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man
no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its
praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of
a child.
Yet as Vashti saw the vast flank of the ship, stained with exposure
to the outer air, her horror of direct experience returned. It was
not quite like the air-ship in the cinematophote. For one thing it
smelt--not strongly or unpleasantly, but it did smell, and with her
eyes shut she should have known that a new thing was close to her. Then
she had to walk to it from the lift, had to submit to glances from the
other passengers. The man in front dropped his Book--no great matter,
but it disquieted them all. In the rooms, if the Book was dropped, the
floor raised it mechanically, but the gangway to the air-ship was not
so prepared, and the sacred volume lay motionless. They stopped--the
thing was unforeseen--and the man, instead of picking up his property,
felt the muscles of his arm to see how they had failed him. Then some
one actually said with direct utterance: "We shall be late"--and they
trooped on board, Vashti treading on the pages as she did so.
Inside, her anxiety increased. The arrangements were old-fashioned and
rough. There was even a female attendant, to whom she would have to
announce her wants during the voyage. Of course a revolving platform
ran the length of the boat, but she was expected to walk from it to her
cabin. Some cabins were better than others, and she did not get the
best. She thought the attendant had been unfair, and spasms of rage
shook her. The glass valves had closed, she could not go back. She saw,
at the end of the vestibule, the lift in which she had ascended going
quietly up and down, empty. Beneath those corridors of shining tiles
were rooms, tier below tier, reaching far into the earth, and in each
room there sat a human being, eating, or sleeping, or producing ideas.
And buried deep in the hive was her own room. Vashti was afraid.
"O Machine! O Machine!" she murmured, and caressed her Book, and was
comforted.
Then the sides of the vestibule seemed to melt together, as do the
passages that we see in dreams, the lift vanished, the Book that had
been dropped slid to the left and vanished, polished tiles rushed
by like a stream of water, there was a slight jar, and the air-ship,
issuing from its tunnel, soared above the waters of a tropical ocean.
It was night. For a moment she saw the coast of Sumatra edged by the
phosphorescence of waves, and crowned by lighthouses, still sending
forth their disregarded beams. These also vanished, and only the
stars distracted her. They were not motionless, but swayed to and fro
above her head, thronging out of one skylight into another, as if the
universe and not the air-ship was careening. And, as often happens on
clear nights, they seemed now to be in perspective, now on a plane;
now piled tier beyond tier into the infinite heavens, now concealing
infinity, a roof limiting for ever the visions of men. In either case
they seemed intolerable. "Are we to travel in the dark?" called the
passengers angrily, and the attendant, who had been careless, generated
the light, and pulled down the blinds of pliable metal. When the
air-ships had been built, the desire to look direct at things still
lingered in the world. Hence the extraordinary number of skylights and
windows, and the proportionate discomfort to those who were civilised
and refined. Even in Vashti's cabin one star peeped through a flaw in
the blind, and after a few hours' uneasy slumber, she was disturbed by
an unfamiliar glow, which was the dawn.
Quick as the ship had sped westwards, the earth had rolled eastwards
quicker still, and had dragged back Vashti and her companions towards
the sun. Science could prolong the night, but only for a little,
and those high hopes of neutralising the earth's diurnal revolution
had passed, together with hopes that were possibly higher. To "keep
pace with the sun," or even to outstrip it, had been the aim of the
civilisation preceding this. Racing aeroplanes had been built for
the purpose, capable of enormous speed, and steered by the greatest
intellects of the epoch. Round the globe they went, round and round,
westward, westward, round and round, amidst humanity's applause. In
vain. The globe went eastward quicker still, horrible accidents
occurred, and the Committee of the Machine, at the time rising into
prominence, declared the pursuit illegal, unmechanical, and punishable
by Homelessness.
Of Homelessness more will be said later.
Doubtless the Committee was right. Yet the attempt to "defeat the sun"
aroused the last common interest that our race experienced about the
heavenly bodies, or indeed about anything. It was the last time that
men were compacted by thinking of a power outside the world. The sun
had conquered, yet it was the end of his spiritual dominion. Dawn,
midday, twilight, the zodiacal path, touched neither men's lives nor
their hearts, and science retreated into the ground, to concentrate
herself upon problems that she was certain of solving.
So when Vashti found her cabin invaded by a rosy finger of light,
she was annoyed, and tried to adjust the blind. But the blind flew
up altogether, and she saw through the skylight small pink clouds,
swaying against a background of blue, and as the sun crept higher, its
radiance entered direct, brimming down the wall, like a golden sea. It
rose and fell with the air-ship's motion, just as waves rise and fall,
but it advanced steadily, as a tide advances. Unless she was careful,
it would strike her face. A spasm of horror shook her and she rang
for the attendant. The attendant too was horrified, but she could do
nothing; it was not her place to mend the blind. She could only suggest
that the lady should change her cabin, which she accordingly prepared
to do.
People were almost exactly alike all over the world, but the attendant
of the air-ship, perhaps owing to her exceptional duties, had grown