“I began to walk along the road, heading towards the town. I was soon in its streets, which curved to follow the contours of the gentle slopes but were otherwise very regular in their spacing. The houses differed slightly from one another in size and style, but the overall impression was one of astonishing uniformity. The walls were made out of pale bricks supported and separated by thin layers of mortar, laid with awesomely mechanical regularity. The houses had glazed windows; these were all exactly the same size, as were the doors, which were constructed of the same unfamiliar substance as the window-frames. There seemed to be only one other kind of edifice apart from the houses. These were much larger constructions, like huge low barns, with numerous doors but no windows. At that time I did not see anyone going into or coming out of any of the windowless buildings.
“I suppose that I had tacitly expected that the world of the future would be cleaner and more orderly than our own, and that life would have become less chaotic. I had expected, too, to find life more leisurely, but the image with which I was confronted now seemed to take all these things to a discomfiting extreme. As I looked about me at the people in the streets I could see hardly any real evidence of purpose in their movements. No one was in a hurry, and no one was carrying anything. Although they moved in groups their conversations were dilatory. There were no vehicles to be seen, nor any domestic animals. The houses had no gardens.
“This does not make sense, I thought. But if it is a fantasy conjured up by my mind and substituted for a much richer reality, what on earth can my mind be about?
“I peered into some of the houses. I saw laden tables, and chairs drawn up around them, sometimes occupied and sometimes not, but I never saw anyone engaged in any activity except serving or eating food. I saw unfamiliar fruits being eaten with the fingers, and I saw people using spoons to draw various different liquids or solids from bowls, but I never saw a knife or a fork, or a plate. I saw no pictures or hangings, nor any other kind of ornamentation. I saw no books or shelves. I saw cribs containing babies, and sometimes heard the babies wailing, but I could detect no signs of distress among the children who were old enough to walk. If the people inside a house became aware that I was looking in they would look back, evincing the same signs of mild alarm that the people on the road had showed when I tried to make contact with them, but they never tried to shoo me away.
“At first I had thought the town pleasant because it was so neat and clean, but it quickly came to seem uncanny. This is not human life, I thought, but a mere simulation of it. These are not people, but automata of some kind, which can maintain some pretence of talking and thinking but cannot do these things in any authentic sense. I wondered whether it might be nothing but an illusion conjured up by a jejune imagination, but when I looked at the slowly setting sun, and the display of colour it created by its effects upon the slightly humid atmosphere, I could not believe that this was other than an actual world.
“Eventually, I became bolder. I went into one of the houses. The inhabitants were seated at the table enjoying a meal, but when I came into the room they stopped immediately, and got up. They twittered at one another in their strange language, and backed up against the wall. The adults extended their arms protectively to the children. When I had come far enough away from the door they went out, leaving me alone with their half-finished repast. In my attenuated form I was not sure that I could taste food properly, and I had not the slightest hunger or thirst, so I contented myself with inspecting the contents of the bowls by eye. Considering that everything else was so simple, the diet which these people enjoyed seemed unusually rich and varied. But where, I wondered, were the fields and orchards which generated this produce? Where were the markets in which it was traded? How was it brought into the houses?
“The people of the house had gone out into the street, and I watched them through the window to see if they would call for help. They did not. They talked to one another, but not to other passers-by. I went to investigate the other rooms in the house. There were several rooms upstairs, each containing a low bed and a closet in which half a dozen tunics hung. There was a bathroom downstairs, and a separate water-closet. The pipes which carried the water were not metallic. The taps in the bathroom were mere levers. The kitchen had a sink, but no range, fireplace or boiler. There were cupboards for bowls, spoons and foodstuffs, but no cooking utensils. There were three dumb-waiters whose shafts disappeared downwards, but I concluded after assiduous searching that the house had no basement or cellar that could be reached from the ground floor.
“It is all mere surface, I thought. The whole town is a toy, whose appearances are controlled from below by hidden mechanisms – but by whom, and for what purpose? These were the questions which preoccupied my mind as I went out into the gathering dusk.”
V
As Copplestone paused I glanced at Wilde, whose lips were pursed. “These are hardly brave and gaudy lies,” he whispered. “They are so anaemic as to be unworthy even of a professor.”
I smiled thinly. “One could have hoped for a more exciting tale,” I admitted, “but it has the ring of sincerity, and there is a mystery of sorts in it.”
Copplestone had already resumed his narrative. “I half-expected that nightfall would put an end to activity within the town but I was wrong. I observed that many more people were emerging on to the streets. As the sky became black and the stars began to shine through, the streets lit up. I do not mean that lamps were lit; it was the actual fabric of the roadway which began to glow with a white, cold luminosity. I could see a similar light within some of the windows of the houses. I inferred that the light was a kind of artificial phosphorescence. A half-moon had risen above the eastern horizon, and was slowly climbing higher. I studied its face closely, and was oddly relieved to find it quite unchanged. However many thousands of years had passed since the era of my birth, some things remained constant and inviolable.
“As the people in my immediate vicinity began to move past me, it seemed that for the first time they moved with a purpose. All were moving in the same direction, as though they had a common destination. Lit from below as they were, their marching figures seemed rather eerie. Curiosity impelled me to fall into step with them. I soon perceived that the crowd was heading for the nearest of those larger buildings with which the houses were interspersed. I saw that all of its many doors now stood open, and that an orderly queue of people was forming at each one. I took a place in one of them and waited for those before me to enter.
“The light inside the barn-like building was as wan and white as that which illuminated the roadway, but it shone down from the ceiling. The building was crowded with machinery of some kind, much of which loomed up to a height considerably above that of a man. The vast room reverberated with a low humming sound, but there was no whining as of turning wheels and no hiss of steam. It was, I guessed, an electrical hum, and I concluded that the whole town must run on electrical power generated in some subterranean region.
“The queues, which remained as orderly within the building as without, extended into narrow corridors between the massive machines, there vanishing from my sight. There were glass-faced dials set in the sides of the machines at eye-level, and levers and switches positioned as though for human arms, but no one made any attempt to read the indicators or activate the levers. There was a slight pulse in the floor beneath my feet, which implied that there was more machinery at a lower level, and I could see several flights of steps leading downwards. There were also upward flights of steps made out of what looked like wrought iron, leading to catwalks which ran all around the inner walls. These were connected by a sparse webwork of railed walkways, which bridged the gap between the longer sides of the rectangular space. Distributed about these catwalks, leaning casually on the guard-rails, were a dozen human figures, distributed in groups of two or three. As soon as I caught sight of them they commanded my attention. Here. I thought, are the masters of this vast charade!
“The figures on th
e walkways were mere silhouettes, limned against the evenly lit ceiling, and I could not hear a word of their conversation, but I felt sure that they were not of the same kind as the docile cattle which swarmed around me. Their postures were lazy, their attitudes too obviously negligent. They were evidently in charge of whatever was happening here, although their presence was hardly necessary; the process was working automatically. I was tempted to step out of line in order to make contact with the real inhabitants of this strange future world, but I hesitated. The line in which I had taken my place had now progressed so far that I was on the point of entering the narrow corridor between the ranks of machines. I would soon be able to see where the queue was heading, and what the people in it had come to do. I decided that there would be time enough to go upstairs when I had satisfied my curiosity on that point.
“The corridor extended for about forty yards between two rows of compartments or stalls. Every few seconds someone would emerge from one or other of these stalls and the person at the head of the queue would take their place. When the man ahead of me took his turn I went with him to watch what he did. Within the dimly lit compartment there was an outward-facing chair, on which the man sat down. He could see that I was watching him, and he hesitated momentarily, but the inhibiting effect of my presence was insufficient to deflect him from his purpose. He reached behind him to draw a long transparent tube through an aperture in the wall. On the end of it was a metal device headed by a slender needle, from which dangled a number of threads. Hitching up the skirt of his brief tunic, the man casually thrust the point of the needle into the flesh inside his thigh, and with practised ease he distributed the threads so that they adhered to his skin and held the needle in place. He then pressed a small switch set in the wall behind him, and sat back listlessly. He did not bother to watch the blood which rapidly filled the transparent tube and disappeared into the wall behind him.
“I can hardly convey the horror which began to grow in me. The bovine nonchalance of it all was quite chilling.
“Another stall became vacant further down the line. The woman who had been standing behind me in the queue showed no disinclination to go to it, nor any resentment of my failure to take my turn. The man looked up at me with an expression I could not evaluate. As my horror increased I began to see new significance in the fact that all the townspeople seemed so plump and so full-complexioned, and so curiously docile. It burst upon me with all the force of revelation that this barn-like edifice was indeed a barn, and that these humans I had likened in my mind to cattle were exactly that: domesticated creatures of little intelligence and less independence, who came to be “milked” each evening, giving a good yield of the good red blood which they had been selectively bred to produce superabundantly. I understood, belatedly, that the “houses” in which these “people” lived were not really houses at all, but mere animal-shelters, whose plumbing and heating had perforce to be controlled from elsewhere, by the herdsmen who kept such livestock.
“They are vampires! I thought, with a thrill of dread. The masters of this world are vampires, which feed on human blood. Nor are they predators which covertly haunt the night, but careful farmers. They have enslaved mankind and reduced the human species to a status hardly above that of the goats and sheep which the earliest human nomads kept.”
Copplestone paused again, briefly, as the memory of it made him shudder. I could see sweat standing on his brow, and his colour had grown worse. I wondered whether he had enough strength to reach the end of his story – and whether I had the stomach to hear him out. I had not expected this; how could I? I dare say that my own colour was as unprepossessing as Copplestone’s; it was all I could do to keep from trembling with wrath. Had all this, I wondered, been set up expressly for my discomfort? Was it all a charade planned to taunt and distress me?
“As I realized what was happening,” Copplestone continued, “I shrank back against the partition. I wondered what might happen if the watchers on the catwalk overcame their tedium sufficiently to notice that I was there. I looked up to see how many of the silhouetted figures were visible from where I stood, but I was shielded by the surrounding walls from all but two of them, who were facing the other way. I began making plans as to how best to make my exit from the building. My earlier enthusiasm to make contact with these masters had evaporated now that I knew that they kept other human beings as livestock.
“The man in the chair detached the adhesive strips, withdrew the needle, and held it carefully while it was drawn back into the wall. He took a piece of lint from a dispenser and used it to mop up the bead of blood which formed upon his thigh, discarding it into a repository set in the wall. As another came to take his place I slid out of the way. This one was a girl, seemingly no more than ten years old. I had no wish to distress her, nor to watch her making her donation of blood, so I followed the man.
“At the far end of the corridor there was an open space much like the one from which I had come. The nearest door was only fifteen paces away, but so was the nearest ascending staircase, and standing on the seventh step of that stairway, looking down at the people who had done their duty and were going home, was a lone man clad in black. Immediately I caught sight of him I attempted to step back into the corridor, to hide myself behind the angle of the wall, but it was too late; he had seen me – and was in no doubt that I was different from the rest. The absurd clothing which my scrupulous psyche had seen fit to invent for the sake of my modesty betrayed me. I could not make out his features very well, but it was apparent that he was by no means as incurious as the people I had tried to speak to on the road. This was a thinking being – but I had every reason to believe that he was no more like me than those who had come here to be milked of their blood.
“However human his form might be, I thought, he is a monster.
“I ran forwards, towards one of the open doors which allowed the human cattle egress from the building. I had not practised running, and the moment I began to move in a new way my former lumpen awkwardness returned in full measure. The strides I took were slow and painful. Confusion amplified my panic, but the more effort I exerted to hurl myself forward the more ungainly I seemed to become. I began to fall, and experienced a sharp thrill of terror. I could not regain my balance. The impact jarred me, but did not knock me out. I scrambled to regain my feet. By the time I had done so, the man from whom I fled had come down from the stair and was moving swiftly towards me. I could see his face clearly now. It was paler than my own, save for the lips, which seemed red and full. His eyes had a hint of luminous green about them; they seemed manifestly inhuman.
“I lurched towards the door. I could not have reached it had not my pursuer been impeded, but his path crossed that of a woman who had emerged from the corridor to his left. She walked dazedly in front of him and they collided. She let out a wail of anguish as she realized, too late, what had happened. He tripped, and feel as heavily as I had, howling as he hit the floor. Desperation lent me the skill which I needed, and I managed to accelerate my progress towards the doorway. I hurled myself through it just ahead of another of the cattle-men. It was not until the cooler air struck my face that it occurred me to wonder what to do next. Where could I run to? Where could I hide?
“I stumbled away from the doorway, determined to reach the shadows beyond the illuminated strip of roadway, but as I did so I realized that the night was filled with sound, which came from above rather than below. Having taken three or four steps into the darkness beside the roadway I looked up into the starry sky, and saw to my astonishment that it was full of shadows, as if a great flock of huge and monstrous bats were wheeling above the town. For a moment, I thought the flying things really were predatory haunters, but they were not alive. They carried lights to signal their position to one another, and their wings were rigid. It was impossible to make out their exact shapes, although they were no more than a few hundred feet above the ground, but the thrumming noise of their engines was unmistakably similar to the sound
which had filled the huge barn. They were machines.
“In God’s name, I thought, what mad kind of world is it into which I have been delivered? Sheer confusion must have brought me to a standstill, for I was no longer running. I was impotently staring upwards into the sky when rough hands grabbed me from behind.”
VI
Copplestone’s voice dissolved into a fit of coughing. The doctor rushed to his side, but the professor’s trembling grew worse, and it seemed that he was on the brink of some kind of fit. After a brief lapse of time the doctor suggested that the rest of us should move into the smoking-room while he saw to the needs of his patient. He promised that the story would continue when Copplestone was fit enough to tell it.
I found myself moving to the door alongside the young man who had seemed – and still seemed – oddly agitated.
“You do not seem to be enjoying yourself, Mr Wells,” I remarked.
“I beg your pardon, Count,” he said in his awkwardly distinctive voice. “I am confused. This whole evening has the appearance of being a joke at my expense.”
I was startled, because I was still wondering whether Copplestone’s story might be an elaborate joke at my expense. “How so?” I asked.
“I suspect that Copplestone has read of a series of articles which I contributed to the National Observer, couched in the form of a tale told by a time-traveller, concerning his exploration of future time. And yet . . . he showed no sign that he recognized my name when Shiel introduced me, and Shiel assures me that Copplestone could not possibly have guessed that he would invite me to be his guest. Then again, what is the purpose of this apparent plagiarism? I cannot fathom it.”
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