The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (38 page)

A quiver ran through the hard surface soil of the plateau as
the great mass of the fleet flagship settled down ponderously to rest. There
was a moment of expectant silence as a great port clanged open and a gangplank
extended to the ground. From somewhere within the ship a fanfare of trumpets
sounded. Slowly and with solemn dignity, surrounded by his staff, Conrad
Krogson, Inspector General of the Imperial Space Marines, advanced to review
the troops.

Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like
the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is
filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the
air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my
meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An arm-chair is
in the centre, by its side a reading-desk—that is all the furniture. And in the
arm-chair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh—a woman, about five feet high,
with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.

An electric bell rang.

The woman touched a switch and the music was silent.

"I suppose I must see who it is," she thought, and
set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery,
and it rolled her to the other side of the room, where the bell still rang
importunately.

"Who is it?" she called. Her voice was irritable,
for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several
thousand people; in certain directions human intercourse had advanced
enormously.

But when she listened into the receiver, her white face
wrinkled into smiles, and she said:

"Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do
not expect anything important will happen for the next five minutes—for I can
give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture on 'Music
during the Australian Period.'"

She touched the isolation knob, so that no one else could
speak to her. Then she touched the lighting apparatus, and the little room was
plunged into darkness.

"Be quick!" she called, her irritation returning.
"Be quick, Kuno; here I am in the dark wasting my time."

But it was fully fifteen seconds before the round plate that
she held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it,
darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who
lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see her.

"Kuno, how slow you are."

He smiled gravely.

"I really believe you enjoy dawdling."

"I have called you before, Mother, but you were always
busy or isolated. I have something particular to say."

"What is it, dearest boy? Be quick. Why could you not
send it by pneumatic post?"

"Because I prefer saying such a thing. I want—"

"Well?"

"I want you to come and see me."

Vashti watched his face in the blue plate.

"But I can see you!" she exclaimed. "What
more do you want?"

"I want to see you not through the Machine," said
Kuno. "I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine."

"Oh, hush!" said his mother, vaguely shocked.
"You mustn't say anything against the Machine."

"Why not?"

"One mustn't."

"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried
the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made
it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not
everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I
hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is
why I want you to come. Come and stop with me. Pay me a visit, so that we can
meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind."

She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a
visit.

"The air-ship barely takes two days to fly between me
and you."

"I dislike air-ships."

"Why?"

"I dislike seeing the horrible brown earth, and the
sea, and the stars when it is dark. I get no ideas in an air-ship."

"I do not get them anywhere else."

"What kind of ideas can the air give you?"

He paused for an instant.

"Do you not know four big stars that form an oblong,
and three stars close together in the middle of the oblong, and hanging from
these stars, three other stars?"

"No, I do not. I dislike the stars. But did they give
you an idea? How interesting; tell me."

"I had an idea that they were like a man."

"I do not understand."

"The four big stars are the man's shoulders and his
knees. The three stars in the middle are like the belts that men wore once, and
the three stars hanging are like a sword."

"A sword?"

"Men carried swords about with them, to kill animals
and other men."

"It does not strike me as a very good idea, but it is
certainly original. When did it come to you first?"

"In the air-ship—" He broke off, and she fancied
that he looked sad. She could not be sure, for the Machine did not transmit
nuances
of expression. It only gave a general idea of people—an idea that was good
enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom,
declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse,
was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape
was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something "good
enough" had long since been accepted by our race.

"The truth is," he continued, "that I want to
see these stars again. They are curious stars. I want to see them not from the
air-ship, but from the surface of the earth, as our ancestors did, thousands of
years ago. I want to visit the surface of the earth."

She was shocked again.

"Mother, you must come, if only to explain to me what
is the harm of visiting the surface of the earth."

"No harm," she replied, controlling herself.
"But no advantage. The surface of the earth is only dust and mud, no life
remains on it, and you would need a respirator, or the cold of the outer air
would kill you. One dies immediately in the outer air."

"I know; of course I shall take all precautions."

"And besides—"

"Well?"

She considered, and chose her words with care. Her son had a
queer temper, and she wished to dissuade him from the expedition.

"It is contrary to the spirit of the age," she
asserted.

"Do you mean by that, contrary to the Machine?"

"In a sense, but—"

His image in the blue plate faded.

"Kuno!"

He had isolated himself.

For a moment Vashti felt lonely.

Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room,
flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There
were buttons and switches everywhere—buttons to call for food, for music, for
clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of
(imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm
deodorised liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that
produced literature. And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated
with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all
that she cared for in the world.

Vashti's next move was to turn off the isolation-switch, and
all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled
with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could
she recommend it? Had she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one's own
ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early
date?—say this day month.

To most of these questions she replied with irritation—a
growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was
horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of
engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one—that
four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much
in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her
lecture on Australian music.

The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since
abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in
her arm-chair she spoke, while they in their arm-chairs heard her, fairly well,
and saw her, fairly well. She opened with a humorous account of music in the
pre-Mongolian epoch, and went on to describe the great outburst of song that
followed the Chinese conquest. Remote and primaeval as were the methods of
I-San-So and the Brisbane school, she yet felt (she said) that study of them
might repay the musician of today: they had freshness; they had, above all,
ideas.

Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received,
and at its conclusion she and many of her audience listened to a lecture on the
sea; there were ideas to be got from the sea; the speaker had donned a
respirator and visited it lately. Then she fed, talked to many friends, had a
bath, talked again, and summoned her bed.

The bed was not to her liking. It was too large, and she had
a feeling for a small bed. Complaint was useless, for beds were of the same
dimension all over the world, and to have had an alternative size would have
involved vast alterations in the Machine. Vashti isolated herself—it was
necessary, for neither day nor night existed under the ground—and reviewed all
that had happened since she had summoned the bed last. Ideas? Scarcely any.
Events—was Kuno's invitation an event?

By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from
the ages of litter—one book. This was the Book of the Machine. In it were
instructions against every possible contingency. If she was hot or cold or
dyspeptic or at loss for a word, she went to the book, and it told her which
button to press. The Central Committee published it. In accordance with a
growing habit, it was richly bound.

Sitting up in the bed, she took it reverently in her hands.
She glanced round the glowing room as if some one might be watching her. Then,
half ashamed, half joyful, she murmured "O Machine! O Machine!" and
raised the volume to her lips. Thrice she kissed it, thrice inclined her head,
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 bora 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.