There have been so many thousands of descriptions of the Asteradio, and so many photographs and drawings of it published in the Press, that it would be idle for me to add anything of that sort here. The superficial appearance of this extraordinary piece of mechanism—if ‘mechanism’ is a legitimate word—resembling, as it always does to me, a sort of mad cross between a telephone booth, a cabinet gramophone, an electric chair, a lift, a wardrobe mirror, an Iron Maiden and a huge camera—is as well known to any man in the street as it is by myself. The only thing, I believe, which nearly always impresses those who have actually beheld it, ‘in the flesh,’ however, is the extraordinary air it has of crudity, of being a contraption, ‘put together’ in a haphazard way. I do not know what exactly it is that one finds lacking—something, I think, in greater dramatic accordance with its world-shaking potentialities, something more glittering, piercingly efficient and mysterious, something, in other words, more in the Mad Scientist tradition. What you actually see is something you feel your younger boy could have put together at home.
I am afraid, then, that those of my readers will be disappointed who had hoped that I might be able to throw any fresh light upon the invention itself. And here I should also make it clear that I am not in a position to make any contribution to any of those other controversies concerning time, dual presence, and identity which are raging around us now. I know the main question the layman wants to ask. Was my body, in the months in which I was millions of miles away in space, at one and the same time enclosed in the Asteradio machine on the third floor of Chandos Street? I cannot answer that question. Crowmarsh continually reiterates that that ‘is not putting the question in the right way.’ We are left in the dark, and sometimes forced to wish that he would be good enough to put the question in the ‘right way’ himself, and give us the right answer! But so far he has given no sign of doing that.
The point here is that I, having made by this machine the most momentous journey in the history of mankind, am as ignorant of the nature of my means of transport as any man in the street. I can only describe my sensations, and leave it at that.
Many people have asked me, not without a certain awed look on their faces, what my feelings were when the door was closed, and I knew the moment had come. I am afraid I am a disappointment even here as well, for that merciful feeling of numbness still persisted, and I had no sensations whatever—at least no sensations other than those of detached curiosity as to what was to befall that remote—that not totally credible figure—myself. As is known, the Asteradio is lit inside with what appears to be a common-or-garden electric bulb. I sat there, looking in turn at the five reflections of myself in the famous five steel mirrors which enclosed me all about. I remember remarking to myself what an ideal contraption this would be for a vain woman, and thinking that Crowmarsh at least should be able to sell his invention to the hairdressing profession if all else failed. Then I looked straight ahead at the reflection dead in front of me, and waited for the works to begin.
They were not tardy in giving me the works. I could just hear them moving about outside, and I sensed an air of bustle and excitement conspicuously lacking in their behaviour a few minutes ago. I heard Baldock give a sort of shout, and then there was a bang, and what I fancied was a curse, as though a table had been overturned accidentally. Finally there came a long droning sound, which was followed by the chug-chugging of what sounded more like the engine of a motor boat than anything else on earth. With this was combined an occasional rumbling noise, as of a distant sliding door.
I cannot possibly describe how incongruous and inadequate to the greatness and the seriousness of the occasion the next few minutes were. The chugging stopped—the droning began again—the droning stopped—the chugging began again—there was a pause in which nothing happened at all. I might have been in some third-rate Swiss train which for some reason could not get out of its station. Again I heard sounds of bustling and banging outside. I surmised that something had gone wrong, and that the whole thing was developing into a farce. Indeed I was just beginning to speculate as to whether I might cry out in question or protest to those outside, when I began to feel that something was happening.
I don’t know how it was, but it seemed all at once as though the guard had blown his whistle. The droning sound began to coincide with the sound of the ‘motor boat’ and both increased in volume. The steel mirrors began to rattle, and I found that I was being gently shaken. Yet panic still was held at bay.
What things happened next to me, and the order in which they happened, are almost impossible to recapture, let alone to relate. I think the next thing I was aware of was the fact that the electric light within was burning with extraordinary, with ferocious, brightness, and at the same time I realized in a flash that I was intolerably hot and almost gasping for air. I looked in the mirror and saw the perspiration pouring down my face.
How had I got into this extraordinary condition? I looked as though I had been pouring sweat for hours. I was conscious of a wild singing noise in my ears, and felt like one in a delirious dream. Was I dreaming? Worse still (the thought suddenly struck me), had I been dreaming? Had I been asleep? A wave of uncontrollable fear and claustrophobia swept over me as it dawned upon me that this was precisely what had happened’. I had been asleep—I had been incarcerated in this hellish contrivance for hours and hours! The horrible thing was that it was exactly six o’clock in the evening! I knew the hour in the world outside with a passionate lucidity and assurance which no man-made timepiece could have ever given me. Outside, all London was going home, taking trains, climbing on to buses…. And to me, only a moment ago, it had been ten o’clock in the morning!
I could not breathe, and I was going to die. Certainly I was going to die—the victim of a crude experiment. My heart could never withstand this heat and this noise—above all the noise—that was worse than the heat. There was a droning roar in my ears like that of twenty-thousand tube-trains crashing into tunnels….
There had been some horrible accident or miscalculation on Crowmarsh’s part, but how could I ever get out? Even if I yelled, how could I be heard now above this noise? Besides which, it paralysed my every faculty. I could not move a finger, an eyelid, let alone raise my voice.
I looked at myself again in the steel mirror, to see what manner of thing it was, this thing that had lived, and now was going to die. For a moment I saw my sodden and agonized face in that excruciating glare (the light itself seemed almost as heartbreaking as the noise and heat)—and then something else happened. I became aware that I was not looking at myself in the mirror. I occupied the space a moment ago occupied by the mirror, and I was looking at myself, noting every detail of my streaming face.
The relief was instantaneous and enormous. The noise, the light, the heat persisted—but some form of extemporized logic informed me that it was beyond their power to hurt the mere reflection of a man. I disowned that wretch sitting there fighting for breath. I wanted nothing but to go to sleep. I believe I went to sleep.
Whether I slept or not my next experience was one of floating in the infinite dark of an infinite void of noise. The noise for a moment had been dimmed, but now it was coming back—or rather it had been going on all the time, and now I was forced to hear it once more.
What followed I can never describe in words. To compare what I now experienced, with what I had experienced before I seemed to sleep, would be to compare the falling of a pin on a piece of cotton-wool with the explosion of a munition works. It seemed that my being had become attuned to every sound that had been made, would be made, could be made by motion and power since time failed to begin! A man goes down to the engine-room of a ship and hears its driving-power throbbing through him. I was down in the engine-room of the Universe! Believe me, there is something of a roar down there.
I do not care to dwell upon what I suffered in the next few ‘minutes’—for along with this terrible noise surging in upon me, there surged in upon me something worse—an
even more horrible Knowledge! And the Knowledge was the Noise, and the Noise was the Knowledge—one and the same thing, and equally emphatic!
‘You’re wrong!—you’re wrong!—you’re wrong!’ In some way my soul was screaming these words in the rhythm of what I was hearing. And another part of me was aware that I was addressing Abel Crowmarsh himself.
That Crowmarsh had made a ghastly mistake, a hideous miscalculation of realities—that he had, as a puny and ignorant mortal, intruded upon forces of inconceivable vastness and menace—this was the thought that obsessed me, which I felt I must somehow remember and take back with me, if ever I got back! No one must suffer again what I was suffering now. I knew all—he knew nothing.
And then somehow even this madly urgent truth seemed to be losing its significance—remained a truth, but was being submerged in another and even vaster truth.
‘It’s two—it’s two—it’s two!’ I can remember screaming. And it was the Universe I was alluding to, and I had unravelled all its mysteries. But behind all mysteries, it seems, there is the mystery of oblivion, and oblivion came upon me then.
I need hardly say that Crowmarsh has since awarded not a jot of objectivity to these experiences of mine on my journey through the wastes of space, and has pointed out their similarity to countless other painful experiences undergone by people under common anæsthesia, which was a condition he actually predicted as being almost certainly attendant upon the undertaking. I myself have neither the requisite knowledge, nor the requisite inner conviction, to dispute the matter with him. Certainly (and here again I resemble innumerable other returned wanderers from the land of anæsthesia) I have no inkling now of that infinite ‘Knowledge’ which took the form of infinite sound, and which I was so desperately anxious to bring back with me to this world. As for that final cry and conviction of the ‘twoness’ implicit in all things, I really have no notion of what I meant. I have no doubt it is susceptible to hundreds of objective or subjective explanations—each equally satisfying to its propounder—the mystic, the brain-specialist, the heart-specialist, the nerve-specialist, the anæsthetist, even, it seems to me, the Hegelian or dialectical materialist!2—but I myself am unable to contribute to the discussion.
As regards the pain, the sense of a mistake having been made, the terrible assurance I had that no man must again suffer what I had been set to suffer, well, I am not so sure of that now. How many women, in the pangs of childbirth, have not sworn to themselves that such an experience must never be renewed by themselves? We all know the fate of that determination—and am I not in like case? I can only tell you that I, for one, would make the journey again—will make it again, if I have the chance.
Notes
1. All fictitious names here. The Asteradio (‘star-transmitter’) is Hamilton’s version of H. G. Well’s ‘Time Machine’.
2. ‘Hegelian or dialectical materialist’: throughout this first chapter, Hamilton is alluding passim to the contemporary interest in dualistic scientific and philosophical thought (space/time, mind/matter, etc. — and no doubt with his own Moribundia/England ‘doubling’ also in view). Here, he refers to the Hegelian ‘dialectic’ of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, and to the Marxist appropriation of it. See Note 26 below.
CHAPTER II
Just as I have been asked by so many people what my feelings were when the door of the Asteradio was finally closed, and my journey lay ahead, so any number of others have wanted to know my first sensations on waking in Moribundia, and knowing that the farthest journey ever taken by man was at an end. Did I know where I was?—did I know who I was?—did I remember what had happened to me?—was I afraid?—and so on and so forth.
The answer is that I felt nothing more than the ordinary sensation of waking from sleeping—combined with the knowledge that I was rather cold, and that this in fact was what was waking me. I remembered what had happened to me, who I was, and what I was doing, with the utmost clarity and incisiveness. I was not afraid, but I wanted to do some more thinking before I opened my eyes and faced facts.
Above all I was filled with a profound sense of peace—the beautiful peace of victorious endeavour, and safety after peril. I wanted to go on lying where I was, draining this sense of peace to the dregs.
I suppose part of this feeling of comfort derived from the knowledge that I was in an atmosphere in which I could breathe and live, and the assurance, imbibed eagerly through every sense, that the scene to which I must at last open my eyes, was to bear countless features similar to those in the world from which I had come.
To begin with, I had put out my hand, and had made certain that I was lying upon grass—grass, moreover, which the sun had only left a little while ago. I myself was now in shadow, but I was certain the sun was still shining in the sky. It was either dawn or evening—I could not say which—the coolness, peacefulness, and freshness suggested either.
Still keeping my eyes closed, I began to listen intently for other sounds—but at first could pick up nothing—certainly no sound of anything like ‘human’ beings. I thought once that I could hear the sound of a fountain playing, but decided it was just a fuzziness in my own ears. At last, however, I became conscious of a very slight but recurring and curiously insistent sound.
I can only convey this sound (as it thus presented itself to my mind) by writing the word ‘Pock.’ It was a sound a man can make by placing his lips tightly together, and quickly snapping them open—a hollow sound you can sometimes hear in a slowly dripping tap. I could not make out whether it was very far away or very near, but finally I discerned that it possessed a definite periodicity of its own.
This curiously irritating little explosion came upon the ear about every fifteen seconds, but after every sixth explosion (as I judged) it ceased for nearly a minute, and then began again.
But sometimes there was a ‘pock’ or two missing in the series of six, and every now and again another sound intruded. This second sound was like the sound of dried peas being slowly turned over in a hollow cylindrical box—or of a gentle wave leaping from a soft sea on to a dreamy beach about a quarter of a mile away…. But as this sound invariably succeeded, and seemed dependent upon, the ‘pock’ sound, I had to conclude that it came from no such romantic source. Occasionally, mingling with, or rising above this second sound, I thought I could hear the dim murmur and cry of distant human voices, but I presumed that this was my imagination.
I do not know how long I might have gone on listening to this sound—which had a lulling effect upon me in my peaceful state—had I not been visited with a sudden idea which made me jump.
Pock … pock … pock … and then a sinister little rattle…. A snake! What else? And within a few inches of me! I swung up into an erect position, and opened my eyes.
I was on a green clipped lawn, surrounded on all sides by the sweet and venerable cloisters of what I immediately saw must be some cathedral or abbey. The gentle evening sun, lighting the green grass to flame at the farther end, shone athwart a scene as typically and gracefully English as anything English I had ever seen. There was no snake or crawling monster near me, and the thought of such a thing was preposterous.
Looking back at it now, I am astonished by the way, in the moments that followed, I took what I saw for granted—totally ignored the stupendous implications of that to which my eyes and senses bore testimony. That blind matter, developing into mind, acting upon itself, and growing self-conscious on a world other than ours, should have proceeded along paths of evolution so astonishingly similar, so that it finally culminated in such familiar phenomena as Gothic (yes, Gothic!) arches and clipped green lawns—here indeed was evidence of a new kind over which the mechanical materialist and the subjective idealist might continue their endless wrangle! But neither this thought—nor the thought of the fame I should win when I returned with this news to our world—even crossed my mind. I suppose I was in a sort of dream.
I stood still for a few minutes—merely gratefully accepting what I saw—and t
hen, treading softly, made my way into the shade of the cloisters themselves.
My sole desire now was to locate the source of those gentle, but peculiarly exciting and perturbing little noises I had heard when my eyes were closed, and which still beat upon my ear. I walked down a dark avenue of arches, at the end of which I had espied, as at the end of a mighty telescope, a glimmering opening, and beyond that some trees.
I found my heart beating faster as I neared the end of this, and with something more than mere wonderment as to what I was going to see. I had a strange feeling that something was happening, that something of considerable moment was ‘on,’ only a matter of a few hundred yards away—something which would also account for the electric atmosphere, the breathless hush3 in which this venerable building and its environment seemed at the moment to be steeped.
I had no sooner emerged again into the light of day than a flash of inspiration seized me. About fifty yards ahead was a long row of trees planted closely together, and glimmering beyond them I had had a glimpse of white forms on a green background which made me quiver with expectation. A few seconds later my keenest hopes were confirmed, and everything which had puzzled me had been clarified.
The white forms were the forms of boys in flannels, and the ‘pocking’ sound which, with my eyes closed, I had nervously mistaken for the advance of a reptile, was no other sound than that sweetest of all sweet and nostalgic sounds to the breast of every Englishman, the sound of bat upon ball! And the sound of the peas in the cylindrical box, of the soft wave on the nearby beach, came from nothing but the little swelling bursts of applause—the intermittent clapping of the spectators who were in the pavilion, or lying on the grass around!
Impromptu in Moribundia Page 3
