City of Endless Night

by Hastings , Milo M. ;

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because,’ I replied, ‘I am engaged upon some chemical research of most unusual nature –’

  ‘Yes,’ nodded the Investigator, ‘I have just looked that up. The more reason you should be honored with paternity.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘you are not informed of the grave importance of the research. If you will consult Herr von Uhl of the Chemical Staff –’

  ‘Entirely unnecessary,’ he retorted; ‘paternity is also important. Besides it takes but little time. No more than you need for recreation.’

  ‘But I do not find it recreation. I have not been able to concentrate my mind on my work since I received notice of my election to paternity.’

  ‘But you were warned against this,’ he said; ‘you have no right to permit the development of disturbing romantic emotions. They may be bad for your work, but they are worse for eugenics. So, if you have made romantic love to the mothers of Berlin, your case must be investigated.’

  ‘But I have not.’

  ‘Then why has this disturbed you?’

  ‘Because,’ I replied, ‘this system of scientific paternity offends my instincts.’

  The Investigator ogled me craftily. ‘What system would you prefer instead?’ he asked.

  I saw he was trying to trap me into disloyal admissions. ‘I have nothing to propose,’ I stated. ‘I only know that I find the paternity system offensive to me, and that the position I am placed in incapacitates me for my work.’

  The Investigator made some notes on a pad.

  ‘That is all for the present,’ he said. ‘I will refer your case to the Chief.’

  Two days later I received an order to report at once to Dr. Ludwig Zimmern, Chief of the Eugenic Staff.

  The Chief, with whom I was soon cloistered, was a man of about sixty years. His face revealed a greater degree of intelligence than I had yet observed among the Germans, nor was his demeanor that of haughty officiousness, for a kindly warmth glowed in his soft dark eyes.

  ‘I have a report here,’ said Dr. Zimmern, ‘from my Investigator. He recommends that your rights of paternity be revoked on the grounds that he believes yours to be a case of atavistic radicalism. In short he thinks you are rebellious by instinct, and that you are therefore unsafe to father the coming generation. It is part of the function of this office to breed the rebellious instinct out of the German race. What have you to say in answer to these charges?’

  ‘I do not want to seem rebellious,’ I stammered, ‘but I wish to be relieved of this duty.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Zimmern, ‘you may be relieved. If you have no objection I will sign the recommendation as it stands.’

  Surely, I thought, this man does not seem very bitter toward my traitorous instincts.

  Zimmern smiled and eyed me curiously. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that to possess a thought and to speak of it indiscreetly are two different things.’

  ‘Certainly,’ I replied, emboldened by his words. ‘A man cannot do original work in science if he possesses a mind that never thinks contrary to the established order of things.’

  The clerks in the outer office must have thought my case a grievous one for I was closeted with their chief for nearly an hour. Though our conversation was vague and guarded, I knew that I had discovered in Dr. Ludwig Zimmern, Chief of the Eugenic Staff, a man guilty himself of the very crime of possessing rebellious instincts for which he had decided me unfit to sire German children. And when I finally took my leave I carried with me his private card and an invitation to call at his apartment to continue our conversation.

  VII

  In the weeks that followed, my acquaintance with the Chief of the Eugenic Staff ripened rapidly into a warm friendship. The frank manner in which he revealed his dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in Germany pleased me greatly. Zimmern was interested in my chemical researches and quickly comprehended their importance.

  ‘I know so little of chemistry,’ he deplored, ‘yet on it our whole life hangs. That is why I am so glad of an opportunity to talk to you. I do not approve of so much ignorance of each other’s work on the part of our scientists. Our old university system was better. Then a scientist in any field knew something of the science in all fields. But now we are specialized from childhood. Take, for example, yourself. You are at work on a great problem by which all of our labor stands to be undone if you chemists do not solve it, and yet you do not understand how we will all be undone. I think you should know more of what it means, then you will work better. Is it not so?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘but I have little time. I am working too hard now.’

  ‘Then,’ said Zimmern, ‘you should spend more time in pleasure on the Free Level. Two days ago I conferred with the Emperor’s Advisory Staff, and I learned that grave changes are threatened. That is one reason I am so interested in this protium on which you chemists are working. If you do not solve this problem and replenish the food supply, the Emperor has decided that the whole Free Level with its five million women must be abolished. His Majesty will have no halfway measures. He is afraid to take part of these women away, lest the intellectual workers rebel like the laborers did in the last century when their women were taken away piecemeal.’

  ‘But what will His Majesty do with these five million women?’ I enquired, eagerly desirous to learn more.

  ‘Do? What can he do with the women?’ exclaimed Dr. Zimmern in a low-pitched but vibrant voice. ‘He thinks he will make workers of them. He does not seem to appreciate how specialized they are for pleasure. He will make machine tenders of them to relieve the workmen, who are to be made soldiers. He would make surface soldiers out of these blind moles of the earth, put amber glasses on them and train them to run on the open ground and carry the war again into the sunlight. It is folly, sheer folly, and madness. His Majesty, I fear, reads too much of old books. He always was historically inclined.’

  On a later occasion Zimmern gave me the broad outlines of the history of German Eugenics.

  ‘Our science of applied Eugenics,’ he said, ‘began during the Second World War. Our scientists had long known that the same laws of heredity by which plants and animals had been bred held true with man, but they had been afraid to apply those laws to man because the religion of that day taught that men had souls and that human life was something too sacred to be supervised by science. But William III was a very fearless man, and he called the scientists together and asked them to outline a plan for the perfection of the German race.

  ‘At first all they advocated was that paternity be restricted to the superior men. This broke up the old-fashioned family where every man chose his own wife and sired as many children as he liked. There were great mutterings about that, and if we had not been at war, there would have been rebellion. The Emperor told the people it was a military necessity. The death toll of war then was great and there was urgent need to increase the birth rate, so the people submitted and women soon ceased to complain because they could no longer have individual husbands. The children were supported by the state, and if they had legitimate fathers of the approved class they were left in the mothers’ care. As all women who were normal and healthy were encouraged to bear children, there was a great increase in the birth rate, which came near resulting in the destruction of the race by starvation.

  ‘As soon as a sufficient number of the older generation that had believed in the religious significance of the family and marriage system had died out, the ambitious eugenists set about to make other reforms. The birth rate was cut down by restricting the privilege of motherhood to a selected class of women. The other women were instructed in the arts of pleasing man and avoiding maternity, and that is where we have the origin of our Free Women. In those days they were free to associate with men of all classes. Indeed any other plan would at first have been impossible.

  ‘A second fault was that the superior men for whom paternity was permitted were selected from the official and intellectual classes. The result
was that the quality of the laborers deteriorated. So two strains were established, the one for the production of the intellectual workers, and the other for producing manual workers. From time to time this specialization has increased until now we have as many strains of inheritance as there are groups of useful characteristics known to be hereditary.

  ‘We have produced some effects,’ mused Zimmern, ‘which were not anticipated, and which have been calling forth considerable criticism. His Majesty sends me memorandums nearly every year, after he reviews the maternity levels, insisting that the feminine beauty of the race is, as a whole, deteriorating. And yet this is logical enough. With the exception of our small actor-model strain, the characteristics for which we breed have only the most incidental relation to feminine beauty. The type of the labor female is, as you have seen, a buxom, fleshly beauty; youth and full nutrition are essential to its display, and it soon fades. In the scientific strains it seems that the power of original thought correlates with a feminine type that is certainly not beautiful. Doubtless not understanding this you may have felt that you were discriminated against in your assignment. But the clerical mind with its passion for monotonous repetition of petty mental processes seems to correlate with the most exquisite and refined feminine features. Those scintillating beauties on the Free Level who have ever at their beck our wisest men are from our clerical strain – but of course they are only the rejects. It is unfortunate that you cannot see the more privileged specimens in the clerical maternity level.

  ‘But I digress to that which is of no consequence. The beauty of women is unimportant but the number of women is very important. When some women were specialized for motherhood then there were surplus women. At first they made workers of them. The war was then conducted on a larger scale than now. We had not yet fully specialized the soldier class. All the young men went to war; and, when they came back and went to work, they became bitterly jealous of the women workers and made an outcry that those who could not fight should not work. The men workers drove the women from industry, hoping thereby each to possess a mistress. As a result the great number of unproductive women was a drain upon the state. All sorts of schemes were proposed to reduce the number of female births but most of these were unscientific. In studying the records it was found that the offspring of certain men were predominantly males. By applying this principle of selection we have, with successive generations, been able to reduce the proportion of female births to less than half the old rate.

  ‘But the sexual impulse of the laborers made them restless and rebellious, and the support of the Free Women for these millions of workers was a great economic waste. When animals had been bred to large size and great strength their sexuality had decreased, while their power as beasts of burden increased. The same principle applied to man has resulted in more docile workers. By beginning with the soldiers and mine workers, who were kept away from women, and by combining proper training with the hereditary selection, we solved that problem and removed all knowledge of women from the minds of the workmen.’

  ‘But how about paternity among the workers?’ I asked.

  ‘Those who are selected are removed to special isolated quarters. They are told they are being taken to serve as His Majesty’s bodyguard; and they never go back to mingle with their fellows.’

  I then related for the doctor my conversation with the workman who asked me about women.

  ‘So,’ said Zimmern, ‘there has been a leak somewhere; knowledge is hard to bottle. Still we have bottled most of it and the laborer accepts his loveless lot. But it could not be done with the intellectual worker.’

  Dr. Zimmern smiled cynically. ‘At least,’ he added, ‘we don’t propose to admit that it can be done. And that, Col. Armstadt, is what I was remarking about the other evening. Unless you chemists can solve the protium problem, Germany must cut her population swiftly, if we do not starve out altogether. His Majesty’s plan to turn the workmen into soldiers and make workers of the Free Women will not solve it. It is too serious for that. The Emperor’s talk about the day being at hand is all nonsense. He knows and we know that these mongrel herds, as he calls the outside enemy, are not so degenerate.

  ‘We may have improved the German stock in some ways by our scientific breeding, but science cannot do much in six generations, and what we have accomplished, I as a member of the Eugenist Staff, can assure you has really been attained as much by training as by breeding, though the breeding is given the credit. Our men are highly specialized, and once outside the walls of Berlin they will find things so different that this very specialization will prove a handicap. The mongrel peoples are more adaptable. Our workmen and soldiers are large in physique, but dwarfed of intellect. The enemy will beat us in open war, and, even if we should be victorious in war, we could not rule them. Either we solve this food business or we all turn soldiers and go out into the blinding sunlight and die fighting.’

  I ventured as a wild remark: ‘At least, if we get outside there will be plenty of women.’

  The older man looked at me with the superiority of age towards youth. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘you have not read history; you do not understand this love and family doctrine; it exists in the outside world today just as it did two centuries ago. The Germans in the days of the old surface wars made too free with the enemy’s women, and that is why they ran us into cover here and penned us up. These mongrel people will fight for their women when they will fight for nothing else. We have not bred all the lust out of our workmen either. It is merely dormant. Once they are loosed in the outer world they will not understand this thing and they will again make free with the enemy’s women, and then we shall all be exterminated.’

  Dr. Zimmern got up and filled a pipe with synthetic tobacco and puffed energetically as he walked about the room. ‘What do you say about this protium ore?’ he asked; ‘will you be able to solve the problem?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think I shall.’

  ‘I hope so,’ replied my host, ‘and yet sometimes I do not care; somehow I want this thing to come to an end. I want to see what is outside there. I think, perhaps, I would like to fly.

  ‘What troubles me is that I do not see how we can ever do it. We have bred and trained our race into specialization and stupidity. We wouldn’t know how to go out and join this World State if they would let us.’

  Dr. Zimmern paced the room in silence for a time. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I should like to see a negro, a black man with kinky hair – it must be queer.’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘there must be many queer things out there.’

  In which I Learn that Competition Is Still the Life of the Oldest Trade in the World

  I

  When I told Dr. Zimmern that I should solve the problem of the increase of the supply of protium I may have been guilty of speaking of hopes as if they were certainties. My optimism was based on the discovery that the exact chemical state of the protium in the ore was unknown, and that it did not exist equally in all samples of the ore.

  After some further months of labor I succeeded in determining the exact chemical ingredients of the ore, and from this I worked rapidly toward a new process of extraction that would greatly increase the total yield of the precious element. But this fact I kept from my assistants whose work I directed to futile researches while I worked alone after hours in following up the lead I had discovered.

  During the progress of this work I was not always in the laboratory. I had become a not infrequent visitor to the Level of the Free Women. The continuous carnival of amusement had an attraction for me, as it must have had for any tired and lonely man. But it was not merely the lure of sensuous pleasures that appealed to me, for I was also fascinated with the deeper and more tragic aspect of life beneath the gaudy surface of hectic joy.

  Some generalities I had picked up from observation and chance conversations. As a primary essential to life on the level I had quickly learned that money was needed, and my checkbook was in frequent demand.
The bank provided an aluminum currency for the pettier needs of the recreational life, but neither the checks nor the currency had had value on other levels, since there all necessities were supplied without cost and luxuries were unobtainable. This strange retention of money circulation and general freedom of personal conduct exclusively on the Free Level puzzled me. Thus I found that food and drink were here available for a price, a seeming contradiction to the strict limitations of the diet served me at my own quarters. At first it seemed I had discovered a way to defeat that limitation – but there was the weigher to be considered.

  It was a queer ensemble, this life in the Black Utopia of Berlin, a combination of a world of rigid mechanistic automatism in the regular routine of living with rioting individual license in recreational pleasure. The Free Level seemed some ancient Baghdad, some Bourbon Court, some Monte Carlo set here, an oasis of flourishing vice in a desert of sterile law-made, machine-executed efficiency and puritanically ordered life. Aided by a hundred ingenious wheels and games of chance, men and women gambled with the coin and credit of the level. These games were presided over by crafty women whose years were too advanced to permit of a more personal means of extracting a living from the grosser passions of man. Some of these aged dames were, I found, quite highly regarded and their establishments had become the rendezvous for many younger women who by some arrangement that I could not fathom plied their traffic in commercialized love under the guidance of these subtler women who had graduated from the school of long experience in preying upon man.

  But only the more brilliant women could so establish themselves for the years of their decline. There were others, many others, whose beauty had faded without an increase in wit, and these seemed to be serving their more fortunate sisters, both old and young, in various menial capacities. It was a strange anachronism in this world where men’s more weighty affairs had been so perfectly socialized, to find woman retaining, evidently by men’s permission, the individualistic right to exploit her weaker sister.