There was a long pause. It was clear that my explanation meant nothing to him, and that he was trying to fit it into some conception of his own and so get some meaning from it. His next question showed me this clearly.
“Is your father a Master of Knowledge?”
“For me, yes,” I answered.
He paused again, pondering.
“If for you, then for all. Otherwise your words have no meaning,” he answered.
I remained silent. How could I explain anything to such a mind? He felt my doubt, for he went on:
“You do not know. You cannot answer. If you are a High One, there is something wrong with your mind.”
“No,” I answered, “I am not a High One.”
“Yet,” he said, “you are not a Submissive One. You are willing, not obeying. What do you mean———?”
“I cannot explain to you,” I said hopelessly. “Can you tell me if my father is in this country, and, if he is, where I can find him?”
He paused a long time, then his answer came:
“How could I answer such a question? How could any man know him?”
“But he would be different from all other men,” I said.
“He could not remain so,” he answered. “You, too,” he added, “now you are beyond understanding, but you cannot remain like that. You will be absorbed.”
“Absorbed!” I cried.
“Yes. The High Ones will do it. You will not remain ill, as you are, and wrong in your mind. You will be cured and absorbed.”
“Absorbed!” I repeated. “Absorbed! Do you mean that my father has been made an imbecile like these poor creatures?”
“It is you who are an imbecile,” came the answer. “Strong in the will but feeble in the mind, like a very little child—yet violent also like a madman at times. It cannot be that you have not once been a High One, for you have the power, but you have no longer wisdom or knowledge such as the High Ones have, nor love such as the workers live by. Where did you come from?”
I pointed upwards.
“From the surface of the earth,” I answered, “where the sun shines, and there are bright days and green grass and all beautiful things.”
He stared at me in silence. Then the message came again:
“The disorder of your mind is deep, but there is no ill that the High Ones cannot cure or ease. You may go.”
I turned and went out of the cabin. If my father had arrived at this land, I knew now that he was either dead or in a worse condition. Soon I, too, would share the same fate, if I could not escape. But where could I escape?
I stood on the deck, looking over the rail at the phosphorescent darkness. The water fled from the ship’s prows in lines of green light, but, beyond the shimmer in the near waters, I could see nothing. Then I saw a form, a heavy brown back that heaved up in the green light, wheeled round and round, and then sank slowly. No, I could not attempt to escape by swimming. Even if there were shores near, I should probably not reach them, and, if I did reach them, I should be no better off, since they would be either in the possession of this people or of dangerous brutes or reptiles. I was tied to the stake, and must stay.
What troubled me most were the words about my being absorbed. Had my father been absorbed, made imbecile? Was I to have the same fate? I could have faced physical danger with a sense of adventure at the thrill it brings, but the thought of the violation of my mind and soul nauseated me.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Silent City
DURING THE whole of the rest of the voyage the ship ploughed her way through an almost complete darkness.
I had no opportunity of observing the stretch of water that we were traversing, or the nature of its shores or its islands, if there were any.
The ship herself was a circle of light, owing to the fact that she was festooned with a network of large, brilliant globes. These threw a light on the waters within a short radius, but beyond that there was a circle of total darkness.
Twice, in this darkness, lights loomed up near us. Once, about two furlongs away on the starboard side, a broad, low vessel was revealed, like a canal barge, piled up with some sort of cargo. I could make out the forms of men rowing, but we were not near enough to get any clear view. I stared at her eagerly, but, though she was going in the same direction as our vessel, we were making a much greater pace, and we passed her in a few minutes.
The second lights emerged from the darkness a short time after the first, and revealed a much larger vessel, with a double deck and two banks of oars. She was going in the opposite direction, and was out of sight in a couple of minutes.
The men on our vessel took not the slightest notice of either boat, nor was there any recognition of us from the others, as far as I could see—no waving of flags or dipping of lights, or any sign that they had seen us.
When the second boat was passing, I was watching her from the bow. Near me a look-out man was posted, with an enormous metal disc beside him, like a huge gong, and a heavy metal clapper in his hand, obviously to give warning if there were any danger of collision. When the vessel had passed, I went over to him and asked him, in very slow, clear Latin, what sort of vessel it was. He did not seem to have heard me. I put my hand on his arm. He brushed it away like a man in a dream. I caught him more firmly by the arm. He unloosed my hand with a flexible movement of powerful, sinuous fingers. I gave up the attempt to get his attention, and moved away. This incident was typical of what was happening to me on that voyage. No matter what I did, I could not get any of the crew to take the slightest notice of my words or my presence.
At first I could hardly believe it. My mind grasped it in a superficial way, as intelligence grasps things before they are felt as well as perceived, but I had not assimilated the knowledge. I could not believe that they were completely unaware of me. It was too incredible, too alien to everything that had ever been known. I could not keep from trying to make contact, to produce some little connection with them, some incident that would give even a semblance of recognition of our common humanity. I kept on trying to speak to them. I asked them questions; made comments on the food, on their appearance, the darkness, my own adventures. There was no answer, no sign from a single person that he had heard me, or even dimly realised my existence. I might as well have been trying to get into touch with a gramophone or a motor-car. That they were conscious at times of my existence was obvious from the fact that they had brought me to various parts of the ship when I first arrived on her, but, apart from this, there was no evidence that they ever perceived me. With the exception of the commander, who did not appear during the rest of the voyage, there was not, as far as I could see, a single person on the ship who had in his mind any solid picture of my personality, or who was aware of me as men on earth are aware of one another.
As I walked amongst them, and watched them pass me and each other as if they and I were non-existent, there came to my mind a story I had heard at a scientific lecture in York—of how pike could be made permanently indifferent to trout in the same tank if they were separated from them for a sufficient length of time by glass partitions. After a while the trout, the lecturer said, became non-existent for the pike. The barrier produced by the glass had remained, as an insuperable psychological fact, at the back of the mind of the pike, even after it had been removed. In the same way some insuperable, psychological barrier seemed to me to have been erected in the mind of each of these men that made them non-existent for each other.
It was not, however, their lack of awareness that weighed most on me. Even if they had been totally unaware of me, but showed any of the normal reactions of humanity to external things or events, they would have been company of a sort; but, no matter how closely I watched, I could not detect a single one of the reactions that life calls up, not merely in men, but in animals, and that make a prison rat, or even a tortoise, a comfort and a healing influence for an isolated man.
It would be difficult for anyone on the upper earth to realise the feeling
of desolation and hopelessness that the absence of this, in these men, began to produce in my mind as I walked amongst them; and with this feeling there was mixed a growing apprehension of something else that emanated from them—some strange influence—as if, in spite of their isolation and their lack of awareness of me, they had been combined against me, and had all their thoughts and emotions pooled into a single compelling force that was dragging me into its orbit. Looking round at their sightless, indifferent faces, I told myself that the thought was a ridiculous one; that in my excited condition I was the prey of absurd imaginings; but, as I watched them, I knew that this was not so —that I was, in fact, in the presence of some force that I could not understand, a force that was invading me and compelling me to conform to its rhythm. The mysterious force generated by an angry mob on earth, when it has become fused by some flame of passion, is the only force that I could compare to this influence that was constricting and dominating me; although nothing could be farther apart than the pushing, noisy, excited collections of human beings that we call “crowds” on earth, and the crew of that extraordinary vessel.
As I watched them, I realised that a cat or dog might as well try to understand the feelings and thoughts of a fish as I to fathom the life of that band of silent ghosts that was bringing me, on that antique vessel, to a destination of which I could not even guess the nature.
What should I find when I got there? Were there towns and cities with civilian populations that had not been subjected to the surgical discipline that had emptied the minds of these men? It was hardly credible that a whole population could have been subjected to such complete slavery. There was nothing on which to base any judgment, or even any conjecture as to the characteristics of the civilisation towards which I was being carried, and at length I gave up the futile task of trying to unravel the problem, and waited with as much patience as I could muster.
As they had taken my watch from me, I don’t know how long the voyage lasted, but it could not have been more than about fifty hours, according to my reckoning, based on my sleeping times and the number of meals I took. During almost the whole of that period we travelled, as I have said, in complete darkness, and, apart from the two vessels that had emerged near us from the gloom, I saw nothing beyond the circle of the ship’s lights, except occasional dim flickers that appeared in the distance and might have been the lights of distant vessels. After we had been about forty-five or fifty hours travelling, however, the Aurora began to show itself again in long streamers that darted over our heads.
I was on the upper deck when it began, and looked around me eagerly. At first I could see nothing but the water. Then, as the lights grew brighter, I saw that we were running towards land. The lake was narrowing, so that its banks were visible on both sides—very close on the right hand —a flat dark shore. In front, more land seemed to bar our way, and I could see lights.
The land closed in still more on us, and presently I saw that we were running into a harbour of some sort, for I could see a circle of lights, and, beneath them, shapes that looked like canal barges moored to the sides of a big horseshoe curve of land that was opening up in front of us.
The Aurora had now come together in a glowing centre that poured out a brilliant and beautiful moon-like light.
I started forward, trying to find out what sort of city I was coming to. My eyes searched the darkness for the buildings; my ears listened eagerly for the noise of traffic, for any sound that would indicate the activities of men. There was none—no hum of humanity, no lights beyond those of the harbour, no buildings of any sort. No matter how I strained my eyes, I could see no sign of houses—nothing, indeed, but a collection of hedges, as if the land near the harbour had been divided up into a great number of individual fields.
I began to think that the town to which the harbour belonged must be some distance inland, behind the enclosed fields, but the country was becoming clear—a sort of flat plateau standing over the harbour—and I could see no sign of houses anywhere in the distance.
As we came nearer, I saw groups of men on the banks of the harbour around the boats, as if they were loading and unloading cargoes or going or coming by water. Also there seemed to be lights behind the hedges that lay at the back of the harbour, but, beyond that, there was no sign of a city or town or group of human dwellings. If there was a city anywhere near, it was difficult to see where it could be hidden.
Could it be, I found myself wondering in amazement, that the people lived like beasts, without any houses or streets or any of the other things that one associated with human life?
Even though I knew that in that land there was no need of houses such as we have, the total absence of them began to fill me with dismay. Perhaps it was the shape of the ship that led me to expect the other outward manifestations of the civilisation of Ancient Rome. Perhaps also the powers shown by the commander had led me to expect civilised dwellings, streets, and other things associated by us with power on the upper earth. Whatever the reason was, I had, in the foolish way in which one imagines unknown things on the pattern of known ones, been letting my mind dwell on visions of urban civilisation, and the sight of this settlement, compared to which the lowest form of kraal would have been human, deepened my foreboding. It was not merely that it made me feel that my hopes of the civilian population being different from the others were illusory, but that it destroyed those other foolish dreams of roofs and windows and the external things that humanity has created round itself. I had thought that the sight of these familiar things would, in some way, make up for the inhuman aspect of the people. I had been hungering for at least that crumb of consolation. Now I knew that that hunger would not be satisfied.
I switched my mind violently away from its fears.
After all, there was nothing in them. It was my own folly that had produced the imaginings of streets and houses. There was obviously a very highly organised civilisation in this land, and I was coming to one centre of it. The fact that it was constructed on entirely different lines from ours did not necessarily mean that it was not equally complicated. At any moment I might meet my father.
At this last thought my excitement grew intense. My mind had, in fact, substituted a new imagining for those of which it had been deprived.
As we ran into the harbour, I stared eagerly at the quays.
Extraordinary as it may seem, I know now, on looking back, that I half expected my father to be waiting for me on the quay; for I kept scanning the groups of men for one much taller than the others.
The quays were well lighted, and, if there had been any such figure there, I should by now have been able to distinguish it from the others. There was, however, no such figure to be seen. At the back of the quays there was a wall with heaps of stuff piled against it, and the men that I had seen were engaged in shifting this to and from the ships, on their backs or on long low carts with wheels. Apart from them there were no people on the quays, no crowd waiting for the ship—and, needless to say, no sign of my father.
The hope of seeing him having departed from me, my mind went back to its other trouble about the unnatural appearance of the settlement. The quays were well built stone quays, with pillars and rings for mooring the ships. The men were engaged in dealing with cargo. In spite of their inhuman aspect, their occupation at least was indicative of some form of trade and commerce. Why then was there no town? Could it be that the people lived underground? If so, what reason could they have for so strange a way of life? My mind kept revolving the question in a futile, troubled way. It was useless to ask the automatons who surrounded me, and who were now bringing the ship carefully to the quay-side, while a few similar robots on the quays waited to catch the mooring-ropes. I was at my destination, and would soon know the secret of this enigma, and with it, probably, my own fate.
All the time I kept looking up and down the quays for a sign of any tall man. There was none. They were all the same undersized, boyish figures—all men, too, as far as I could see; no women amo
ngst them, and certainly no children nor animals.
As I waited at the side of the ship, a man touched me on the shoulder. I turned. One of the men was waiting to conduct me somewhere. I followed him, in the direction of the commander’s cabin. As we came to it, the curtains swung back and the commander came out. I stood in front of him and bowed slightly. He watched me with his steady, unwinking stare, yet I drew comfort, after the days spent with the solitary robots, from the contact with his eyes. The message was coming to me.
“I am sending you over to the Masters of Will and of Knowledge. They will understand you and cure you.”
“I hope they will understand me,” I answered slowly. ‘‘If they do, they can help in the only way I ask to be helped—by bringing me to my father.”
“They cannot do that,” came the answer. “Even those who combine will and knowledge cannot do that, since there is no such person as your father.”
“But there is such a person,” I said. “He came down here, and he is either here or he is dead.” “He cannot be here now—not such as you think him to be—as you yourself will not be after a little while. However, I do not understand you nor you me. The Masters will understand, the Masters of Knowledge, and, when they have understood, they will cure you.”
He began to walk past me. When I asked, “Where is the city?” he stopped.
“The city?” came his question.
“Yes, yes, the city, the settlement, the collection of dwellings of men who live here together? Where is it? I see nothing.”
“That is it,” he answered, turning his head slightly in the direction of the hedges.
“But there are no houses. I can see no dwellings of men, no streets.”
“There are dwellings and paths between them,” came the answer. “You will see. They await you now to bring you to the Masters of Knowledge.”
He passed on. Two men came and stood beside me, took me each by an arm, and led me after him. He passed down the deck, and went off the ship to the quay by a gangway. Then he turned along the quay to the right.
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