City of Endless Night Page 4

  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 ofsombre depression. Alone again in my apartment I found difficulty ingetting my mind back upon chemical books. With a sense of relief Ireported to Holknecht that I thought myself sufficiently recovered toreturn to work.

  My laboratory I found to be almost as secluded as my living quarters. Iwas master there, and as a research worker I reported to no man until Ihad finished the problem assigned me. From my readings and fromHolknecht's endless talking I had fairly well grasped the problem onwhich I was supposed to be working, and I now had Holknecht go carefullyover the work he had done in my absence and we prepared a report. This Isent to headquarters with a request for permission to start work onanother problem, the idea for which I claimed to have conceived on myvisit to the attacked potash mines.

  Permission to undertake the new problem was promptly granted. I now setto work to reproduce in a German laboratory the experiments by which Ihad originally conquered the German gas that had successfully defendedthose mines from the world for over a century. Though loath to make thisrevelation, I knew of no other "Discovery" wherewith to gain the stakesfor 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. Weneeded new material, new apparatus, and new data and I encouragedHolknecht to advise me as to where to obtain these things and so gainedrequisite working knowledge.

  The experiments and demonstrations finished, I made my report. Myimmediate superior evidently quickly recognized it as a matter tooimportant for his consideration and dutifully passed it up to his ownsuperiors. In a few days I was notified to prepare for a demonstrationbefore a committee of the Imperial Chemical Staff.

  They came to my small laboratory with much eager curiosity. From theirmanner of making themselves known to me I realized with joy that theywere dealing with a stranger. Indeed it was improbable that it shouldhave been otherwise for there were upwards of fifty thousand chemists ofmy rank in Berlin.

  The demonstration went off with a flourish and the committee weregreatly impressed. Means were at once taken to alter the gas with whichthe Stassfurt mines were flooded, but I realized that meant nothingsince I believed that my companions had abandoned the enterprise and thesecret that had enabled me to invade mines had not been shared with anyone in the outer world.

  As I anticipated, my revelation was accepted by the Chemical Staff asevidence of profound scientific genius. It followed as a logical matterthat I should be promoted to the highest rank of research chemists withthe title of Colonel. Because of my youth the more was made of thehonour. This promotion entitled me to double my previous salary, to alarger laboratory and larger and better living quarters in a distantpart of the city.

  My assistant would now be of the rank I had previously been and asHolknecht was not eligible to such promotion I was removed entirely fromall previous acquaintances and surroundings and so greatly decreased thechance of discovery of my true identity.

  ~2~

  After I had removed to my new quarters I was requested to call at theoffice of the Chemical Staff to discuss the line of research I shouldnext 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. Theinsignia on the left breast indicating the achievements in chemicalscience were already familiar to me, but those on the right breastwere 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 andour group,--one hundred and forty-seven children,--one hundred and fourof them sons, fifty-eight already of a captain's rank, and twenty-nineof them colonels--my children of the second and third generation numberabove two thousand. Only three men living in Berlin have more totaldescendants--and I am but seventy-eight years of age. If I live to beninety I shall break all records of the Eugenic Office. It all comes ofgood breeding and good work. I won my paternity right, when I was buttwenty-eight, just about your age. If you pass the physical test,perhaps you can duplicate my record. For this early promotion you havewon qualifies you mentally."

  Astonished and alarmed beyond measure I could find no reply and satstaring dumbly, while Herr von Uhl, beginning to speak of chemicalmatters, inquired if I had any preference as to the problem I should nowtake up. Incapable of any clear thinking I could only ask if he had anyto suggest.

  Immediately the old man's face brightened. "A man of your genius," hesaid, "should be permitted to try his brain with the greatest problemson which the life of Germany depends. The Staff discussed this and hasassigned you to original research for the finding of a better method ofthe extraction of protium from the ore. To work on this assignment youmust of necessity share grave secrets, which, should they be disclosed,might create profound fears, but your professional honour is a sufficientguarantee of secrecy. In this research you will compete with some of themost distinguished chemists in Berlin. If you should be successful youwill be decorated by His Majesty and you will receive a liberal pensioncommensurate with the value of your discovery."

  I was profoundly impressed. Evidently I had stumbled upon something ofvital importance, the real nature of which I did not in the leastcomprehend, and happily was not supposed to. The interview was ended bymy being entrusted with voluminous unpublished documents which I wastold to take home and study. Two armed men were ordered to accompany meand to stand alternate guard outside my apartment while I had thedocuments in my possession.

  ~3~

  In the quiet of my new abode I unsealed the package. The first sheetcontained the official offer of the rewards in store for success withthe research. The further papers explained the occasion for the gravityand secrecy, and outlined the problem.

  The colossal consequence of the matter with which I was dealing grippedand thrilled me. Protium, it seemed, was the German name for a rareelement of the radium group, which, from its atomic weight and otherproperties, I recognized as being known to the outside world only as alaboratory curiosity of no industrial significance.

  But, as used by the Germans, this element was the essence of lifeitself, for by the influence of its emanations, they had achieved thesynthesis of protein capable of completely nourishing the human body--athing that could be accomplished in the outside world only through theaid of natural protein derived from plants and animals.

  How I wished, as I read, that my uncle could have shared with me thisrevelation of a secret that he had spent his life in a fruitless effortto unravel. We had long since discovered how the Germans had synthesizedthe carbohydrate molecule from carbon dioxide and water and builttherefrom the sugars, starches and fat needed for human nutrition. Weknew quite as well how they had created the simpler nitrogen compounds,that this last step of synthesizing complete food proteins--a stepabsolutely essential to the support of human life wholly from syntheticfoods--the chemists of the outer world had never mastered.

  But no less interesting than the mere chemistry of all this was thehistory of it all, and the light it threw on the larger story of howGermany had survived when the scientists of the world had predicted herspeedy annihiliation. The original use of protium had, I found, beendiscovered late in the Twentieth Century when the protium ores of theUral Mountains were still available to the German chemists. After Russiahad been won by the World Armies, the Germans for a time sufferedchronic nitrogen starvation, as they depended on the protium derivedfrom what remained of their agriculture and from the fisheries in theBaltic. As the increasing bombardment from the air herded them withintheir fast building armoured city, and drove them beneath the soil inall other German territory and from the surface of the sea in theBaltic; they must have perished miserably but for the discovery of a newsource of protium.

  This source they had found in the uninhabited islands of the Arctic,w
here the formation of the Ural Mountains extends beneath the sea.Sending their submarines thence in search of platinum ores they had notfound platinum but a limited supply of ore containing the even morevaluable protium. By this traffic Germany had survived for a century anda half. The quantity of the rare element needed was small, for itseffect, like that of radium, was out of all proportion to its bulk. Butthis little they must have, and it seems that the supply of orewas failing.

  Nor was that all to interest me. How did the German submarine get to theArctic since the World State had succeeded, after half a century ofeffort, in damming the Baltic by closing up several passes among theDanish Islands and the main pass of the sound between Zealand andSweden? I remember, as a youngster, the great Jubilee that celebratedthe completion of that monumental task, and the joy that hailed from theannouncement that the world's shipping would at last be freed from anancient scourge.

  But little had we of the world known the magnitude of the German fearsas the Baltic dam neared completion. We had thought merely to protectour commerce from German piracy and perhaps to stop them from getting alittle copper and rubber in some remote corner of the earth. But we didnot realize that we were about to cut them off from an essential elementwithout which that conceited and defiant race must have speedily run upthe white flag of absolute surrender or have died to the last man, likerats in a neglected trap.

  But the completion of the Baltic dam evidently had not shut off thesupply of Arctic ore, for the annual importation of ore was given rightup to date though the Baltic had been closed for nearly a score ofyears. Eagerly I searched my papers for an item that would give somehint as to how the submarines got out of the dammed-up Baltic. But onthat point the documents before me were silent. They referred to theArctic ore, gave elaborate details as to mineralogy and geology of thestrata from which it came, but as to the ways of its coming into Berlinthere was not the slightest suggestion. That this ore must come bysubmarine was obvious. If so, the submarine must be at large in theAtlantic and Arctic seas, and those occasional reports of periscopessighted off the coast of Norway, which have never been credited, werereally true. The submarines, or at least their cargoes, must reachBerlin by some secret passage. Here indeed was a master mystery, asecret which, could I unravel it and escape to the outer world with theknowledge, would put unconditionally within the power of the World Statethe very life of the three hundred millions of this unholy race that wasbred and fed by science in the armoured City of Berlin, or that, workinglike blind moles of the earth, held the world at bay from off thesterile and pock-marked soil of all that was left of the one-timeGerman Empire.

  That night I did not sleep till near the waking hour, and when thebreakfast container bumped into the receiving cupboard I was noddingover the chemical papers amid strange and wonderful dreams.

  ~4~

  Next day with three assistants, themselves chemists of no mean rank, Iset to work to prepare apparatus for repeating all the known processesin the extraction and use of the rare and vital element. This workabsorbed me for many weeks, during which time I went nowhere and saw noone and slept scarce one hour out of four.

  But the steady application told upon me, and, by way of recreation, Idecided to spend an evening on the Level of Free Women, a place towhich, much though it fascinated me, I had not yet mustered thecourage to go.

  My impression, as I stepped from the elevator, was much as that of a manwho alights from a train in a strange city on a carnival night. Beforeme, instead of the narrow, quiet streets of the working and livingquarters of the city, there spread a broad and seemingly endless hall ofrevelry, broken only by the massive grey pillars that held up themulti-floored city. The place was thronged with men of varied ranks andprofessions. But more numerous and conspicuous were the women, the firstand only women that I had seen among the Germans--the Free Women ofBerlin, dressed in gorgeous and daring costumes; women of whom but fewwere beautiful, yet in whose tinted cheeks and sparkling eyes was allthe 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 statureand features. But here was resplendent variety and display. Men from allthe professional and military classes mingled indiscriminately, theirdivers uniforms and decorations suggesting a dress ball in the capitalof the world. But the motley costumes of the women, who dressed with thelicense of unrestrained individuality, were even more startling andbizarre--a kaleidoscopic fantastic masquerade.

  I wondered if the rule of convention and tyranny of style had lost allhold 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 leftone confounded as to what manner of creature dwelt therein, to the otherextreme of mere gaudily ornamented nudity. I smiled as I recalled theworld-old argument on the relative modesty of much or little clothing,for here immodesty was competing side by side in both extremes, bothseemingly equally successful.

  But it was not alone in the matter of dress that the women of the FreeLevel varied. They differed even more strikingly in form and feature,for, as I was later more fully to comprehend, these women were drawnfrom all the artificially specialized breeds into which German sciencehad wrought the human species. Most striking and most numerous werethose whom I rightly guessed to be of the labour strain. Proportionallynot quite so large as the males of the breed, yet they were huge,full-formed, fleshly creatures, with milky white skin for the most partcrudely painted with splashes of vermilion and with blued or blackenedbrows. The garishness of their dress and ornament clearly bespoke thepoorer quality of their intellect, yet to my disgust they seemed fullyas popular with the men as the smaller and more refined types, evidentlyfrom the intellectual strains of the race.

  Happily these ungainly women of the labour strain were inclined to herdby themselves and I hastened to direct my steps to avoid as much aspossible their overwhelming presence.

  The smaller women, who seemed to be more nearly human, were even morevariegated in their features and make-up. They were not all blondes,for some of them were distinctively dark of hair and skin, thoughI was puzzled to tell how much of this was inborn and how muchthe work of art. Another thing that astonished me was the widerange of bodily form, as evidently determined by nutrition. Clearlythere was no weight-control here, for the figures varied from extremeslenderness to waddling fatness. The most common type was that of mildobesity which men call "plumpness," a quality so prized since the worldbegan that the women of all races by natural selection become relativelyfatter than men.

  For the most part I found these women unattractive and even repellent,and yet as I walked about the level I occasionally caught fleetingglimpses of genuine beauty of face and form, and more rarely expressionsof a seeming high order of intelligence.

  This revelling multitude of men and girls was uproariously engaged inthe obvious business of enjoying themselves by means of every art knownto appeal to the mind of man--when intelligence is abandoned and moralrestraint thrown to the winds.

  I wended my way among the multitude, gay with colour, noisy with chatterand mingled music, redolent with a hundred varieties of sensuousperfume. I came upon a dancing floor. Whirling and twisting about thecolumns, circling around a gorgeous scented and iridescent fountain,officers and scientists, chemists and physicians, each clasping in hisarms a laughing girl, danced with abandon to languorous music.

  As I watched the dance I overheard two girls commenting upon theappearance of the dancers. Whirling by in the arms of a be-medalledofficer, was a girl whose frizzled yellow hair fell about adun-brown face.

  "Did you see that, Fedora, tanned as a roof guard and with that hair!"

  "Well, you know," said the other, "it's becoming quite the fashionagain."

  "Why don't you try it? Three baths would tan you adorably and you dohave the proper hair."

  "Oh, yes, I have the hair, all right, but my skin won't stan
d it. Itried it three years ago and I blistered outrageously."

  The talk drifted to less informing topics and I moved on and came toother groups lounging at their ease on rugs and divans as they watchedmore skilful girls squirming through some intricate ballet on anexhibition platform.

  Seeing me stand apart, a milk-white girl with hair dyed pink cametugging at my arm. Her opalescent eyes looked from out her chalkycountenance; but they were not hard eyes, indeed they seemed the eyes ofinnocence. As I shook my head and rebuffed her cordial advance I felt,not that I was refusing the proffered love of a painted woman, butrather that I was meanly declining a child's invitation to join herplay. In haste I edged away and wandered on past endless gaming tableswhere men in feverish eagerness whirled wheels of chance, while garishlydressed girls leaned on their shoulders and hung about their necks.

  Announced by shouts and shrieking laughter I came upon a noisy jumble ofmechanical amusement devices where men and girls in whirling upholsteredboxes were being pitched and tumbled about.

  Beyond the noise of the childish whirligigs I came into a space wherethe white ceiling lights were dimmed by crimson globes and picturescreens were in operation. It did not take long for me to grasp theessential difference between these pictured stories and those I had seenin the workmen's level. There love of woman was entirely absent from thescreen. Here it was the sole substance of the pictures. But unlike thelove romances of the outer world, there were no engagement rings, nowedding bells, and never once did the face or form of a child appear.

  In seating myself to see the pictures I had carefully chosen a placewhere there was only room for myself between a man and one of thesupporting columns. At an interlude the man arose to go. The girl whohad been with him arose also, but he pushed her back upon the bench,saying that he had other engagements, and did not wish her company. Themoment he was gone the girl moved over and proceeded to crowdcaressingly against my shoulder. She was a huge girl, obviously of thelabour strain. She leaned over me as if I had been a lonely child andshe a lonelier woman. Crowded against the pillar I could not escape andso tried to appear unconcerned.

  "Did you like that story?" I asked, referring to the picture that hadjust ended.

  "No," she replied, "the girl was too timid. She could never have won aroof guard captain in that fashion. They are very difficult men, thoseroof guard officers."

  "And what kind of pictures do you prefer?" I asked.

  "Quartettes," she answered promptly. "Two men and two girls when bothgirls want the other man, and both men want the girl they have. Thatmakes a jolly plot. Or else the ones where there are two perfect loversand the man is elected to paternity and leaves her. I had a man likethat once and it makes me sad to see such a picture."

  "Perhaps," I said, speaking in a timorous voice, "you wanted to go withhim and be the mother of his children?"

  She turned her face toward me in the dim light. "He talked like that,"she said, "and then, I hated him. I knew then that he wanted to go andleave me. That he hadn't tried to avoid the paternity draft. Yes, hewanted to sire children. And he knew that he would have to leave me. Andso I hated him for ever loving me."

  A strange thrill crept over me at the girl's words. I tried to fathomher nature, to separate the tangle of reality from the artificial ideasingrained by deliberate mis-education. "Did you ever see children? Here,I mean. Pictures of them, perhaps, on the screen?"

  "Never," said the girl, drawing away from me and straightening up tillmy head scarce reached her shoulder. "And I never want to. I hate thethought of them. I wish I never had been one. Why can'twe--forget them?"

  I did not answer, and the labour girl, who, for some technical flaw inher physique had been rejected for motherhood, arose and walkedponderously away.

  After this baffling revelation of the struggle of human souls caught inthe maw of machine-made science, I found the picture screen a dull deadthing, and I left the hall and wandered for miles, it seemed, pastendless confusion of meaningless revelry. Everywhere was music andgaming and laughter. Men and girls lounged and danced, or spun thewheels of fortune or sat at tables drinking from massive steins, ahighly flavoured variety of rather ineffectual synthetic beer. Olderwomen served and waited on the men and girls, and for every man was atleast one girl and sometimes as many as could crowd about him. And sothey sang, and banged their mugs and sloshed their frothy beverage.

  A lonely stranger amidst the jostling throngs, I wandered on through thecarnival of Berlin's Level of Free Women. Despite my longing for humancompanionship I found it difficult to join in this strange recrudescentpaganism with any ease or grace.

  Girls, alone or in groups, fluttered about me with many a covert or openinvitation to join in their merry-making, but something in my haltingmanner and constrained speech seemed to repulse them, for they wouldsoon turn away as if condemning me as a man without appreciation of thevalue of human enjoyment.

  My constraint and embarrassment were increased by a certain sense ofguilt, a feeling which no one in this vast throng, either man or woman,seemed to share. The place had its own standard of ethics, and they wereshocking enough to a man nurtured in a human society founded on thesanctification of monogamous marriage. But merely to condemn thisrecreational life of Germany, by likening it to the licentious freedomthat exists in occasional unrestrained amusement places in the outerworld, would be to give a very incorrect interpretation of Berlin'sLevel of Free Women. As we know such places elsewhere in the world thereis always about them some tacit confession of moral delinquency, somepretence of apology on the part of the participants. The women who sorevel in the outer world consider themselves under a ban of socialdisapproval, while the men are either of a type who have no sense ofmoral restraint or men who have for the time abandoned it.

  But for this life in Berlin no guilt was felt, no apology offered. Themen considered it as quite a normal and proper part of their life, whilethe women looked upon it as their whole life, to which they had beentrained and educated and set apart by the Government; they accepted therole quite as did the scientist, labourer, soldier, or professionalmother. The state had decreed it to be. They did not question itsmorality. Hence the life here was licentious and yet unashamed, much, asI fancy was the life in the groves of Athens or the baths ofancient Rome.