The Twenty-One Balloons PMC

by William Pene du Bois

  “That’s reasonable,” I remarked. “But tell me, how did each restaurant get to be so different? You have told me that all of the families come from San Francisco. From what I can see and hear of them they all seem to be Americans, yet their houses are as varied and international as the pavilions at a World’s Fair.”

  “We are all Americans here. The international restaurants were built simply to give variety to our days. When, in the early stages of our lives here, we found that we could all live happily under the Restaurant Government, we decided to make each restaurant different so that on certain days we could look forward to having a food which was unusual and good to eat. We Americans all have different inherited tastes so we decided that each restaurant should serve the food of a different nation. We arranged this alphabetically also. The A.’s run an American restaurant and serve only real American cooking. You are now eating at the B.’s. This is a British chop house. The C.’s run a Chinese restaurant. The D.’s run a Dutch restaurant, the E.’s an Egyptian restaurant; you can run through the alphabet up to T. The T.’s run a Turkish coffee house.”

  “And you, Mr. F., run a French restaurant?”

  “It’s as easy as that,” said Mr. F.

  “Is there a Krakatoan restaurant?” I asked.

  “Naturally. It is run by Mr. K. and specializes in dishes of strictly native foods; odd dishes prepared from the bread of the bread trees, the milk from the trunks of the milk palms; cocoanuts, bananas and more exotic fruits, and mostly the wonderful fish which are so easily found in the ocean which surrounds us. We couldn’t think of what style of architecture to use for a Krakatoan restaurant, so we invented one. It is made out of crystal glass bricks, to suggest the diamond mines which are the Island’s most guarded treasures; and inside most of these glass bricks we have sealed rare and colorful tropical fish, because for many months they were our main source of food.

  It looks like a house made of ice cubes and fresh fish and is a very inviting place to eat on ‘K’ Day of the hot summer months.”

  “What sort of restaurant do the S.’s run?” I asked.

  “A Swedish Smorgasbord restaurant.”

  “And R.?”

  “He runs a Russian tearoom.”

  “What a wonderful place this Island is!” I exclaimed. “I am certainly looking forward to T Day, because I love spaghetti.”

  “Mr. I.’s Italian restaurant serves the best,” assured Mr. F.

  “Have you names for the months of the year?”

  “We do in a way, but the names of the months are very seasonal and depend entirely on the stocks of food we have on hand. We now have a surplus of lamb, so we voted to call this the Month of Lamb. Each restaurant has been asked to serve a lamb specialty on its menu. Today is ‘B’ Day of the Month of Lamb, so we are having British mutton chops. British mutton chops are hard to beat. On ‘F’ Day, my day, I will serve lamb chops, with béarnaise sauce, or perhaps I will serve a roast of lamb cooked with garlic. On ‘T’ Day the Turkish coffee house will specialize in Shishkebab, which is lamb cooked on metal skewers. Of course our restaurants serve a choice of meats, but in the Month of Lamb you can always count on one lamb dish in all the menus.”

  “The more I hear of Krakatoa, the more I like it.

  There’s just one more thing which puzzles me. How do you get your supplies? How did you get all of the materials to build these houses?”

  “That was a direct result of the Restaurant form of government. We are all so happy here that none of us has any desire to give away the secrets of Krakatoa’s diamond mines. We have given up fighting between ourselves for selfish control of the mines, so we have nothing to keep us from taking frequent trips to foreign countries. We always go to different countries. We cover up our trail by frequently selling our freighter and buying a new one. No boat of ours has ever been seen in two different countries. By simply picking up a handful of diamonds from the floor of our mines we are able to make enough money in foreign countries to fill a new freighter each trip with the best of everything we need. The last of our houses was completed recently. They have taken seven years to build. It has been a long and gradual process on which we have all worked very hard.”

  “How about me?” I asked. “I have just arrived here. I have no family. Do you want me to change my name? Should I start building myself a restaurant? I hate to think that I am in any way upsetting anything here. Another restaurant would ruin your calendar. What do you want me to do?”

  “I am afraid,” said Mr. F., “that you will have to be in the peculiar but rather happy position of being a perpetual guest. You may stay in my house as long as you want, or move around if you wish. As for the food situation, you will simply follow our daily calendar and eat with us every day. When a family prepares for eighty people, it isn’t at all bothered by an extra guest. As for changing your name, I wouldn’t advise it at all. Since you won’t have a restaurant there will be no need to name a day after you. Another good reason is that the twenty-first letter in the alphabet is ‘U.’ You wouldn’t want to be called Mr. U. Everytime somebody said, ‘Hey, you!’ you would have to turn around. If someone asked you who you are, you would have to answer, ‘I am ‘U’ You would keep overhearing snatches of conversation which would bother you. If someone were to tell a friend, ‘I want to see you tonight,‘ you would wonder what was meant by ‘you.’ You would keep asking yourself, ‘Does “you” in this case mean “you” or “U”? If “you” means “U” and “U” is me, then that lady wants to see me tonight.’ And then you would wonder why. I tell you, Professor Sherman, ‘U’ is a bad name.”

  THE F. FAMILY

  I laughed at this and agreed with Mr. F. to leave my name alone. Then Mr. F. told me that he had a most unusual house to show me. “It’s the house of Mr. M. who runs the Moroccan restaurant. He not only discovered Krakatoa but he has also discovered ways of making life more pleasant. Mrs. M. is a nurse. The children, M-1 and M-2, have very inventive minds. Come with me and I’ll show you what I believe to be the most fantastic house in the world.”

  VII

  The Moroccan House of Marvels

  ON OUR WAY TO MR. M.’S HOUSE I ASKED Mr. F. what the citizens of Krakatoa did with all of their spare time. “You have told me that only families with creative interests were chosen by Mr. M. to come here. You said that people with inventive minds were selected because they would be less apt to be bored on a small island such as this. Well,” I asked, “how is it working out? You have nineteen days out of each of your months in which, according to your Constitution, you have no work to do—are you bored, or have you interests here which keep you busy?”

  “We are kept busy here in much the same manner as people are kept busy in any other country, except of course that the diamond mines which we own place our living on a slightly higher standard. Keeping busy in other countries is usually interpreted as earning a living. Earning a living means in its simplest form providing food and shelter. Our Restaurant Government takes care of our food needs. We have devoted our combined creative abilities to making our shelters as magnificent as possible. We built the houses which you see now one at a time. We chose a house for each represented country which we thought was most typically beautiful of that country, and then went ahead and built it. For instance, my house is very much like the famous Petit Trianon. I bought the detailed plans of the Petit Trianon in a little shop in Versailles. We had the stones all cut to order in France and loaded them in our ship, and brought them back to Krakatoa. These stones were all numbered and lettered, corresponding to the plans. Building my house was as enjoyable to us as a huge set of toy blocks is to a young child. On subsequent trips we bought suitable furniture. We all worked together until each house was completed. The builders supervised the actual construction; the painters either selected paintings, made copies of originals, or made paintings of their own for the houses. We handled, furnished, and decorated each house as a hobby; the fabulous hobby of the richest families in the world—which
is what we happen to be. It has kept us working pretty hard.”

  “Is the food here always good?” I asked. “Or do some families, either out of laziness or lack of interest, prepare poor meals on their days?”

  “No one seems to have slipped up yet. As soon as you start to run a restaurant you become tremendously interested in food. I suppose that it is simply pride which makes one try to make better meals than the other families. You see, on your day every family comes to your house to eat. I always find on ‘F’ Day that I am somehow trying to prove that my day is best. Then there is this to consider: we are all interested in food and look forward to eating. If I were to prepare a poor ‘F’ Day at my house, I would have reason to fear that the others would do the same on their days and we would have a miserable month of food.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “But then everything doesn’t work out as neatly as I have made it seem, particularly now that our houses are all finished. To be sure, we work very hard on our day of the month; but recently we have spent considerable time in doing absolutely nothing at all.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” I hastily asked.

  “Nothing!” shouted Mr. F. “I am happy to see that you are a good loafer. Certain prudish people in other countries seem to find that ‘busy hands are kept out of mischief,’ or some other such silly idea. We have developed loafing on this Island to such an expert extent that even our hands are completely relaxed. Our only work now, besides cooking, is in trying to make life more pleasant for ourselves and for each other. The house you are about to see is one on which we have all been working lately. It was one of the first to be completed and now we are going all over it with new improvements. If some of our inventions work in this house we will install them in our own houses.

  “From the outside,” continued Mr. F., “you can plainly see that Mr. M.’s Moroccan house is of simple and solid construction. That is one of the main reasons why we chose it to work on first. It is easier to adapt new ideas to a house of simple rigid lines than it would be, for example, to a house with domes and minarets and towers such as Mr. T.’s Turkish coffee house. We discovered right away that almost all of us had ideas of improvements that required some form of mechanical motive power, so we first of all made over the cellar of Mr. M.’s house. The usual cellars of our houses are filled with barrels of wine. We dug a separate cellar next door, lined it with the usual diamond boulders to make it sound and immovable, built a roof over it, and moved Mr. M.’s fine Moroccan wines into this new private cache.

  “Most of our ideas required hydraulic pumps to put them in motion, so we first installed a steam engine in Mr.

  M.’s cellar—but here we are. Come, I’ll take you first to the cellar.”

  We were greeted at the door by Mr. and Mrs. M. and their children, M-1 and M-2. They hadn’t had so many things to talk about at breakfast and had reached their home long before we had. Mr. M. sensed immediately that Mr. F. was taking me on a tour of inspection of his house, so rather than complicate matters he said that his house was ours for the morning and to feel free to wander through it and inspect it as we liked. “I’ll go downstairs and get some steam up,” he said, “in case you feel like trying out any of the inventions.”

  We followed Mr. M. down into the cellar. There was a boiler and furnace which looked to me much like the equipment to be found in the cellar of any American home and Mr. M. told us that stoking the fire for a steam engine was no more difficult than keeping an ordinary furnace running. The room was well insulated because on a tropical island it would be impossible to live in a house heated by the sun above, and a furnace below. Of course the boiler was piped to the pistons of a huge steam engine—this was different from anything found in the ordinary American home. The rest of the cellar was an extraordinary maze of polished brass shafts running from the floor to the ceiling. The flywheel of the steam engine furnished power to operate numerous hydraulic pumps which evidently made these brass shafts go up and down. The steam engine was also attached to an electric generator. This whole cellar was sort of a mechanical jungle more complicated than the engine room of a ship. I was anxious to get out of there fast, first of all because I was dying to see what all of this machinery operated upstairs; and then too there seemed little space in this huge room in which to move around without being burned, smeared with grease, crushed, or receiving electric shocks. Mr. F. seemed to feel the same way about the room, and only Mr. M. and M-1 and M-2 felt at home as they dashed about through this brass forest checking dials and gauges.

  I noticed, as we were about to leave, that two long white sheets of cloth were coming from a slit in the ceiling down into the cellar. These wide cloth bands passed through a sort of large flat boiler, then on through what appeared to be the kind of drying machines used in paper factories, then back through rollers up another slit in the ceiling.

  “What in the world is that?” I asked.

  “Come,” said Mr. F. “First I shall show you Mr. and Mrs. M.’s bedroom.”

  We walked upstairs and into a bedroom on the first floor. It was furnished in excellent Moroccan taste. I say excellent with some reservations. I personally am not too fond of that style. But aside from these observations, I noticed nothing unusual about the room at first.

  “Have there been improvements made in this room?” I asked.

  “Mrs. M. used to be a nurse,” replied Mr. F., “and to nurses bedmaking seems to become extremely boring after awhile. If you stop to think of it, nurses in large hospitals spend a good deal of their time in making beds. It is natural that they should soon tire of it, particularly when they suddenly find themselves to be as rich as Mrs. M. We all came to Mrs. M.’s rescue with this amazing bed. It has continuous sheets.”

  “How does it work?” I immediately inquired.

  Mr. F. walked over to Mrs. M.’s bureau, opened the top drawer, and took from there a crank. He inserted the crank into a hole in the footboard of the bed and asked me to watch closely. He started to twist the crank and the sheets started to move across the bed, passing on rollers through a sideboard on through the floor. “When I twist this crank,” explained Mr. F., “the sheets pass through this sideboard down through the floor into the cellar. There, they pass through a boiler where they are washed, then through a drying machine. They next pass through steam-heated rollers where they are pressed; then come up through the floor, through the other sideboard of the bed on rollers, and back to the top of the bed. This continuous sheet is marked off in bed-widths. Every morning Mrs. M. simply turns the crank until a bed-width has passed from one side to the other side of her bed. This action starts the washing machines, diverts heat from the furnace to the drying machine, and while one length of sheets is being pressed, fresh widths of hot white sheets are revealed on her bed.”

  “Incredible!” I exclaimed. “But what about blankets?”

  “Good Lord, man,” said Mr. F., “we never use blankets here. We’re just a few miles below the Equator.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” I said. “Have you made inventions for every room in this house?”

  “We have. Each family originally chose a room to work on, although several families have worked on some rooms. We were all interested in the dining room. I’ll show that to you next. You see, there are many problems attached to feeding eighty people, even if it’s only once a month. There are four members to each family, and the children help a lot; but even so you can well imagine that the problems of preparing an elaborate breakfast, clearing that off and preparing a lunch, getting that out of the way and getting dinner ready are big and tiresome. What do you think of this dining room?” he asked.

  I looked at the room we had just entered. It was enormous but absolutely bare. The floor was highly polished and had sort of a design of disks on it, one large disk surrounded by four smaller ones. This design was repeated twenty times on the floor. The walls had pictures hanging on them, scenes of charging Arabs on horseback and portraits of marabouts, sultans,
and viziers.

  “It looks more like a Moroccan ballroom of some sort,” I answered. “Where are the chairs and tables?”

  “Exactly,” said Mr. F. “It’s easy to clean, eh, Professor Sherman? No tables to sweep under, no chairs to get in your way.”

  “Perfect,” I answered. “But what do you eat on?”

  At this a wild look came over Mr. F.’s face. “Watch this,” he said. He walked out in the hall and pulled a great lever. He came back to my side and took me over to the far corner of the room. “Look at the floor,” he said. I looked. There were suddenly small wisps and puffs of steam coming from the circular disks on the floor, then these disks started to rise slowly like some nightmarish garden of mushrooms, and soon each group of disks was up out of the floor forming little groups of four flat stools around little round tables.

  “Cleaning up is easy here,” he said. “After M-1 and M-2 have removed the dishes, silverware, and tablecloths, Mr.

  M. lowers the chairs and tables by pressing the lever, and Mrs. M. and he then wash the floor. Chairs, tables, and floors are all taken care of for the month in one motion.”

  “Bravo ! What goes on in the other rooms of this Moroccan house of marvels?”

  “The livingroom isn’t by any means perfected,” he said, “but I’ll show it to you if you want to see it.”

  “Lead on.”

  “You see,” explained Mr. F., lowering his voice considerably, “Mr. P., Mr. Q., and Mr. R. were poor but extremely inventive scientists when they were picked by Mr. M. to come to Krakatoa. They are all three of them fascinated with the extraordinary power and many uses of the electric current. It was they who insisted that the electric generator be attached to the already heavily burdened steam engine in the cellar. I think all of their new-found wealth has gone a little to their heads. Mr. M. wasn’t awfully anxious to turn over his livingroom to them. He feels that their ideas are perhaps a little too advanced, even for Krakatoa. But what could he do? He had already given a room to each of the other families to work on, so he felt obliged to turn over the livingroom to these three remaining inventors.”