by Mike Ashley
Part of the way we traveled in horseless electric carriages after we grew tired of walking. Then again we took to our feet and after a time halted before a vast expanse of machinery installed under an illimitable shed. It looked like an enormous jungle of metal mechanism.
“What is this?” I asked of Hammerfleet. “It resembles a forest, but a forest of iron and steel.”
“That’s precisely what it is,” he answered. “And we’re now going to stroll through it.”
We passed’ in, and were soon lost in the shadows of this wilderness, where the mighty trunks and the waving branches of huge trees were represented by the uprights, beams, levers, cranks, and rods of vast machines.
“All our factory-work is done in this way now,” Hammerfleet courteously explained to me. “This tangle of mechanism runs for the most part automatically, and is governed by one man. It covers many acres.”
Wheels were spinning round in the most bewildering manner, huge trip-hammers were thudding down, with tons of force, in various places, and, at intervals, some great overwhelming bar of metal weighing thousands of pounds would come swinging down from the roof and almost touch the ground with a heavy swoop that meant death to any man who got in its way.
“Why” I exclaimed, “it is like the maze of life. Anyone who should pass under one of those swinging beams at the wrong moment would be crushed out as though by a blow of doom. They seem to exemplify fate.”
“Quite so,” he agreed.
“Let us go back,” I proposed.
“No,” he objected, “that would be cowardly. Besides, you cannot find your way back safely now. The same sort of steel beams are swinging low behind us as in front. If you were to turn back, you would have to run the same risk of being crushed. I am your only guide. You must go forward with me and take your chances.”
“Yet,” I returned, “you say that this whole forest of moving machinery is regulated by one man? Suppose anything should happen to him; that he should die suddenly; or should be asleep or fainting and incapable at this very moment. The machinery would go on, and we might, perhaps, be destroyed under it.”
“This is the situation exactly,” answered Hammerfleet. “The engineer is asleep. I had him drugged in advance.”
“Then you intend to murder me here, in this forest of steel?” I asked defiantly, but with a decided inward shudder.
“Oh, no; I didn’t say that,” he returned coolly. “But I shall leave you to trace your own course; and if anything fatal happens to you it will be laid entirely to the machinery.”
“You villain!” I exclaimed. “So this is your trap for me, is, it? Well, it’s a pretty large one for such small game, and I’ll see whether I can make my way through.”
I started running and dodging ahead, nimbly, but warily through the awful shadows, the bewildering electric lights spotted here and there; and the throbbing, swinging, whirling, or rising and falling masses of metal, all of which appeared to be consciously aiming blows at me.
“Hold on!” Cried my enemy. “You will certainly be killed. Stop! On one condition I will help you out.”
“And that?” I shouted back, pausing,
“Is that you never again speak a word of love to Electra or recur to the wild idea of marrying her.”
“Death sooner!” I retorted. “I will never consent to such a promise.” And once more I started on my perilous advance through the forest of steel.
It was a frightful experience. In all my former life put together I had not suffered so much fearful excitement, anxiety and terror as were crowded into the next few minutes. A numbing chill crept up through me from my feet to my brain, and it seemed to me that I could actually feel my hair growing white.
Suddenly I thought the end had come. Everything seemed to stop. I stopped. Had I really been struck, and was I dead? Or was this merely imagination? Certainly the great moving wilderness of metal had come to a standstill. The next moment I heard an enormous ringing voice sending towards me from the farther border a loud hail: “Bemis, we are here. You are saved!”
It was the voice of Zorlin; and immediately following it came the rich contralto of Electra; “This way, this way! Come to us, Bemis.”
The bright glare of a searchlight swept through the darksome tangle like a ray direct from Heaven, and by it I was enabled to see my path clear. In a few minutes I had joined my rescuers, and Hammerfleet came after me with a deceitful air of solicitude relieved.
BOOK II.
CHAPTER VI.
IMPROVED CONDITIONS
From the moment of my fortunate escape, Zorlin was my close friend. It was he who, by the extraordinary power of mind reading, and the perception of distant, unseen things, which his people, the Kurols, possess, had divined the plot against me and the peril I was in. He had turned the rest of the party back from their journey to find me, and Electra had caused the machinery to be stopped just in time.
To Zorlin, of course, I told the whole story; and when we reached Graemantle’s house, near Ithaca, now one of the suburbs of New York, that wise man was taken into confidence. The result was a reconsideration on his part as to the propriety of letting Hammerfleet marry Electra. They were both “Children of the State,” as all persons of unusual physical and mental endowments were permitted to become at the age of forty, after passing through examinations and inspection, and having their internal condition carefully ascertained by X-rays. They were then suitably mated in marriage to someone of equal standard, with a view to perpetuating and increasing the best elements of the race.
All degenerates were kept in asylums, called museums, where they were permitted to have their own literature, music, and amusements under State supervision, with an attempt at gradual reformation; and were not permitted to marry. So, too, criminals were segregated in special districts — the men and the women apart — and were not allowed to marry; in short, were eliminated from the human family and prevented from menacing posterity, all without cruelty or capital punishment.
Now, Hammerfleet had clearly been guilty of an intended crime. He was therefore dismissed from the company of Children of the State, but not yet condemned to imprisonment.
On the other hand, though, I did not come up to the required standard. Besides. I had been only twenty-eight when I was vivificated, and was considered altogether too young to marry Electra, who was forty-five and in the first bloom of womanhood. This made the situation very puzzling. Zorlin, however, recommended that I should not think of marrying anyone.
“In Kuro,” he said one day at breakfast, “we do not marry.”
“Ah! Then Mars must be something like Heaven,” I commented, turning to Eva, who blushed, but did not look unkindly at me. “Suppose we go there,” I added.
“Will you?” She said, with an eager readiness that quite touched me. “Oh, I should so like to go — with you!”
“But how do you keep Kuro populated?” I asked Zorlin.
“We are created, in a manner, spontaneously,” he replied, “by the exertion of will and unselfish desire, and the fulfillment of many conditions of life and character that you Earth people do not understand. I am sorry to say, too, that you never can, owing to your condition, quite understand or fulfill them. You must live in your way, and can live rightly, but not on so high a plane as ours.”
I noticed that he said, “We are created,” not “We create ourselves.” This led to some talk on religion, and he told us a good deal about his home planet. The religion of Kuro is much like Christianity; in fact, it is a clearer, more luminous perception of Christianity than most of us have. God is, for them, the creator; and their belief in the Redemption is the same as ours, except that they take a cosmic view of it in relation to all the inhabitants of all worlds. It is, in their minds, the key of the universe, the solution of the whole problem of life. I shall not go into the matter in this brief memorandum; for, while Zorlin showed that they recognized the sacred history enacted upon Earth as affecting other spheres, he explained that they loo
k upon it as a manifestation of the great central verity which they can also perceive in other manifestations. That which we perceive is perfectly and eternally true; but they think they can see more of this eternal truth, or deeper into it, than we.
I hesitate to dwell on this subject, because — as usual in theological matters his utterances caused much trouble and uproar a little later. That was what he had in mind when he foreboded that his corning would cause disturbance.
It was not long before I learned that there had been a reunion of all Christians on a great and solid basis of harmony; and the advantages of this to the whole earth were very apparent. When I looked back to my old period of the nineteenth century, it seemed incredible that human beings could have extracted and diffused from religion, which is the highest good, so much of misery and hatred.
Mars is smaller than Earth, of course; and Zorlin told us, also, that the number of people is smaller in proportion: so that there are never more than can be developed to the highest pitch of wisdom, health, and efficiency there; and he thought we might learn something valuable from this example. Their average of intelligence is very much above the human; and this accords with the law they claim to have discovered, that the inhabited planets are superior in mind and spirit according as they are farther away from the sun.
“We know more of actual natural science than you; as well as of great spiritual truths. We are in constant mental communication with some of the planets. Besides, we learn a great deal from the meteors that fall gently into our atmosphere. These are usually fissured, and contain in their crevices the germs of plant and animal life, which we carefully cultivate and mature; so that we have large park tracts full of wonderful cosmic flora and fauna. The canals that your telescopes have discovered on our planet are, in part, a system of irrigation for these parks. By virtue of our very general and clear communion with the universe, through this and other means, and by our whole mode of living, we are able to convey a good deal of our intelligence to inanimate substances and what you call ‘forces,’ so that they act almost as though by a volition of their own. I am glad to see that you to a certain extent are approaching this plane, although you seem to be hampered by the necessity you feel of accomplishing results by physical and mechanical means. No machinery, however ingenious, and no amount of invention, however marvelous, will ever take the place of willpower and character. Those are the things you will have to cultivate. And you will have to cultivate restraint as opposed to expansion, with its ever-increasing laxity, if you hope to have the world wag really well.”
It is easy to see how this kind of talk, when often repeated, set people into a ferment wherever Zorlin came.
He was treated as a distinguished guest of the nation and of the entire earth; and I traveled in his wake as a mere incidental satellite. My luster as a survivor of my vanished century was eclipsed by his grandeur of interest.
In spite of what he said, I thought the earth had achieved a vast improvement. New York, like the other large cities, was now a barracks for business and storage, but was plentifully provided with shady trees and open places. Most people lived healthily and simply in the country, and could run down to the former metropolis from a distance of hundreds of miles in a very short time when occasion demanded. Here, as in Chicago, many of the tall buildings, or “skyscrapers,” had been made available for landscape gardening, and there were still plenty of them left to house the poor and sick and needy. Afterwards, when I visited London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and other European capitals, I found the same state of things, except that their old buildings were lower. Mankind had decided, after long experience and persistent trials, that large cities are unfit to live in; and the human family, when crowded so closely in a limited area, become dirty and nervous, and that its abodes and the very ground on which they stand grow foul and unwholesome. Cities and dwelling-places have been voted down as outposts or annexes of hell.
They were now cleansed, renovated, and made fit for the occupancy of their business garrisons and for laborers and the poor.
Libraries were kept in the cities, and enormous numbers of newly printed duplicate copies of books, ancient and modern, were sent out to subscribers, or sent free to people in the country; or the contents were transmitted to anyone, anywhere, by phonograph and telephone. Similarly, theatrical performances were given publicly in every rural district or in any private house, by kinetoscope or vitascope, with or without words; but this did not at all interfere with the performance of living actors and actresses, who likewise furnished the original performance for vitascope reproduction, and were able by means of this same invention to give permanent records of gesture and expression for the benefit of pupils in the histrionic art. Collections of paintings and sculpture, instead of being exhibited for a limited time in some one gallery in a city, were carried round to all quarters of the outlying regions in compact and commodious cars built for the purpose, vastly increasing the market for the works of artists.
Everybody, in short, had civilization brought to his front door, wherever he lived, or within easy reach of his home by walking balloon or electric bicycle.
Gas was used almost exclusively for heat and electricity for lighting. Electric lighting had been brought to a point of perfection that made its radiance soft, diffused, and clear, without undue sharpness; and the eyesight of human beings had greatly improved in consequence, near sight and blindness having been much diminished.
Starch, sugar, and protean substances were made in immense quantities by factories on the Amazon, in Indiana, and in Africa, from wood fiber, by chemical transformations — the construction of the molecules of carbohydrates and methods of rearranging this construction having been discovered, so that no energy was absorbed or given out in the transformation. Thus, food of a simple kind was amazingly abundant and cheap. Artificial wood, also, was made from compressed chloro-cellulose and talc, with a solvent, and disintegrated by water under pressure.
Artificial leather was produced by the electrical fixature of nitrogen in carbohydrates. Shoes were molded directly from this material, one machine making three hundred pairs of shoes in an hour. They were afterwards passed through another process to make them flexible, and the porosity of the leather was varied to suit different climates, shoes for damp climates having large pores and those for dry regions having pores that were infinitesimal.
Food and clothing provision, therefore, and wood for building were as abundant as could be. Forest preservation was also carefully attended to, with the best effects on climate and water-supply. Bricks were made six times as large as the old style; and dried in roomy iron chambers with fifty per cent of sand to prevent shrinkage. They were then hoisted into place in large quantities by a machine and laid — several courses at a time — with a cement mixed of lime, clay, and nitre, which produced intense heat and fused the masonry into a solid, permanent mass, so that ordinary house-building was very easy.
Then in respect of health and bodily comfort, a method had been perfected of causing new teeth to grow by means of calcareous, antisepticised bandages.
The wise men of the race had determined that the white corpuscles of the blood are the policemen of organized beings against microbes. By the education of these corpuscles, and inuring then to microbes of every kind, they were made capable of resisting the attacks of the enemy; and even chemical poisons were rendered harmless by the training of the white corpuscles. A compound virus had likewise been discovered and brought into use, consisting of the weakened cultures of rabies, consumption, diphtheria, cholera, splenic fever, erysipelas, typhoid, yellow, scarlet, and malarial fever, and several other diseases of microbic origin. Children received an inoculation with this virus once in seven years, by compulsory law; and the diseases against which it was directed had become rare.
In addition to all this, it had become possible to manufacture pure diamonds by subjecting prepared metal crystals to the action of time, heat, and pressure; while immersed in bisulphide of carbon, in bulbs
of pure quartz. By a magnetically deflected arc, the surface was plumbagoed, and pure iron was electroplated over the ball until it increased to twenty times its original diameter. Then the whole was submitted to a gradually rising temperature until the softening-point was reached. Gold and silver were obtained by the reaction between volatilized sulphur and iron, in graphite tubes separated by a porous partition, and raised to 7000 degrees of Fahrenheit by superheated gases, and this had brought about a change in the currency system. Platinum was now the standard of value. Its rate of value was very high, and very little of it was ever seen in circulation; but it made a solid basis. The general currency was based upon the value of permanent taxable property; but this value was scientifically measured, and subject to very little fluctuation. It acted, however, as a balance wheel, controlling expenditure and speculation; and speculation, as it used to be practiced, had almost ceased.
With such advantages and improvements — and I may say that during a brief flight through Europe and the Americas, and the regenerated empires of China and Japan, I found much the same state of things prevailing — it would seem that people ought to be contented. Government, too, is now much more satisfactorily conducted, by small, efficient, and responsible committees, though on a republican plan, instead of by parliaments, congresses, and mobs, as of old. The “federation of the world” has been achieved. The nations of Europe and Asia, with Africa, in their several unions, co-operate with us through a world Committee of Twenty; and the fierce light of honor and responsibility and watchfulness that beats upon these Twenty gives them no chance to fool or prevaricate with the race. Besides, they do not want to do so. It is happier and pleasanter to be honest, and is the highest kind of diplomacy.
