The Machine
Stops
I
THE AIR-SHIP
Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like
the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by
lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no
apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are
no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation
opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair
is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk-that is all the
furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump
of flesh-a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white
as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.
An electric bell rang.
The woman touched a switch and the music was silent.
"I suppose I must see who it is", she thought,
and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was
worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of
the room where the bell still rang importunately.
"Who is it?" she called. Her voice was irritable,
for she had been interrupted often since the music began.
She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human
intercourse had advanced enormously.
But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled
into smiles, and she said:
"Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do
not expect anything important will happen for the next five
minutes-for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then
I must deliver my lecture on “Music during the Australian
Period”."
She touched the isolation knob, so that no one else could
speak to her. Then she touched the lighting apparatus, and
the little room was plunged into darkness.
"Be quick!" She called, her irritation returning.
"Be quick, Kuno; here I am in the dark wasting my time."
But it was fully fifteen seconds before the round plate that
she held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot
across it, darkening to purple, and presently she could see
the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the earth,
and he could see her.
"Kuno, how slow you are."
He smiled gravely.
"I really believe you enjoy dawdling."
"I have called you before, mother, but you were always
busy or isolated. I have something particular to say."
"What is it, dearest boy? Be quick. Why could you not
send it by pneumatic post?"
"Because I prefer saying such a thing. I want----"
"Well?"
"I want you to come and see me."
Vashti watched his face in the blue plate.
"But I can see you!" she exclaimed. "What
more do you want?"
"I want to see you not through the Machine," said
Kuno. "I want to speak to you not through the wearisome
Machine."
"Oh, hush!" said his mother, vaguely shocked. "You
mustn"t say anything against the Machine."
"Why not?"
"One mustn"t."
"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried
the other.
"I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy.
Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine
is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you
in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like
you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is
why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet
face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind."
She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a
visit.
"The air-ship barely takes two days to fly between me
and you."
"I dislike air-ships."
"Why?"
"I dislike seeing the horrible brown earth, and the
sea, and the stars when it is dark. I get no ideas in an air-
ship."
"I do not get them anywhere else."
"What kind of ideas can the air give you?"
He paused for an instant.
"Do you not know four big stars that form an oblong,
and three stars close together in the middle of the oblong,
and hanging from these stars, three other stars?"
"No, I do not. I dislike the stars. But did they give
you an idea? How interesting; tell me."
"I had an idea that they were like a man."
"I do not understand."
"The four big stars are the man"s shoulders and
his knees.
The three stars in the middle are like the belts that men
wore once, and the three stars hanging are like a sword."
"A sword?;"
"Men carried swords about with them, to kill animals
and other men."
"It does not strike me as a very good idea, but it is
certainly original. When did it come to you first?"
"In the air-ship-----" He broke off, and she fancied
that he looked sad. She could not be sure, for the Machine
did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general
idea of people - an idea that was good enough for all practical
purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom, declared
by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse,
was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable
bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial
fruit. Something "good enough" had long since been
accepted by our race.
"The truth is," he continued, "that I want
to see these stars again. They are curious stars. I want to
see them not from the air-ship, but from the surface of the
earth, as our ancestors did, thousands of years ago. I want
to visit the surface of the earth."
She was shocked again.
"Mother, you must come, if only to explain to me what
is the harm of visiting the surface of the earth."
"No harm," she replied, controlling herself. "But
no advantage. The surface of the earth is only dust and mud,
no advantage. The surface of the earth is only dust and mud,
no life remains on it, and you would need a respirator, or
the cold of the outer air would kill you. One dies immediately
in the outer air."
"I know; of course I shall take all precautions."
"And besides----"
"Well?"
She considered, and chose her words with care. Her son had
a queer temper, and she wished to dissuade him from the expedition.
"It is contrary to the spirit of the age," she
asserted.
"Do you mean by that, contrary to the Machine?"
"In a sense, but----"
His image is the blue plate faded.
"Kuno!"
He had isolated himself.
For a moment Vashti felt lonely.
Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room,
flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived
her. There were buttons and switches everywhere - buttons
to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath
button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble
rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized
liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button
that produced literature. and there were of course the buttons
by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though
it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared
for in the world.
Vashanti"s next move was to turn off the isolation switch,
and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst
upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and
speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend
it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one"s
own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public
nurseries at an early date? - say this day month.
To most of these questions she replied with irritation -
a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the
new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public
nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas
of her own but had just been told one-that four stars and
three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was
much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for
it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.
The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since
abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their
rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their
armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well.
She opened with a humorous account of music in the pre Mongolian
epoch, and went on to describe the great outburst of song
that followed the Chinese conquest. Remote and primæval
as were the methods of I-San-So and the Brisbane school, she
yet felt (she said) that study of them might repay the musicians
of today: they had freshness; they had, above all, ideas.
Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received,
and at its conclusion she and many of her audience listened
to a lecture on the sea; there were ideas to be got from the
sea; the speaker had donned a respirator and visited it lately.
Then she fed, talked to many friends, had a bath, talked again,
and summoned her bed.
The bed was not to her liking. It was too large, and she
had a feeling for a small bed. Complaint was useless, for
beds were of the same dimension all over the world, and to
have had an alternative size would have involved vast alterations
in the Machine. Vashti isolated herself-it was necessary,
for neither day nor night existed under the ground-and reviewed
all that had happened since she had summoned the bed last.
Ideas? Scarcely any. Events-was Kuno"s invitation an
event?
By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from
the ages of litter-one book. This was the Book of the Machine.
In it were instructions against every possible contingency.
If she was hot or cold or dyspeptic or at a loss for a word,
she went to the book, and it told her which button to press.
The Central Committee published it. In accordance with a growing
habit, it was richly bound.
Sitting up in the bed, she took it reverently in her hands.
She glanced round the glowing room as if some one might be
watching her. Then, half ashamed, half joyful, she murmured
"O Machine!" and raised the volume to her lips.
Thrice she kissed it, thrice inclined her head, thrice she
felt the delirium of acquiescence. Her ritual performed, she
turned to page 1367, which gave the times of the departure
of the air-ships from the island in the southern hemisphere,
under whose soil she lived, to the island in the northern
hemisphere, whereunder lived her son.
She thought, "I have not the time."
She made the room dark and slept; she awoke and made the
room light; she ate and exchanged ideas with her friends,
and listened to music and attended lectures; she make the
room dark and slept. Above her, beneath her, and around her,
the Machine hummed eternally; she did not notice the noise,
for she had been born with it in her ears. The earth, carrying
her, hummed as it sped through silence, turning her now to
the invisible sun, now to the invisible stars. She awoke and
made the room light.
"Kuno!"
"I will not talk to you." he answered, "until
you come."
"Have you been on the surface of the earth since we
spoke last?"
His image faded.
Again she consulted the book. She became very nervous and
lay back in her chair palpitating. Think of her as without
teeth or hair. Presently she directed the chair to the wall,
and pressed an unfamiliar button. The wall swung apart slowly.
Through the opening she saw a tunnel that curved slightly,
so that its goal was not visible. Should she go to see her
son, here was the beginning of the journey.
Of course she knew all about the communication-system. There
was nothing mysterious in it. She would summon a car and it
would fly with her down the tunnel until it reached the lift
that communicated with the air-ship station: the system had
been in use for many, many years, long before the universal
establishment of the Machine. And of course she had studied
the civilization that had immediately preceded her own - the
civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system,
and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of
for bringing things to people. Those funny old days, when
men went for change of air instead of changing the air in
their rooms! And yet-she was frightened of the tunnel: she
had not seen it since her last child was born. It curved-but
not quite as she remembered; it was brilliant-but not quite
as brilliant as a lecturer had suggested. Vashti was seized
with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into
the room, and the wall closed up again.
"Kuno," she said, "I cannot come to see you.
I am not well."
Immediately an enormous apparatus fell on to her out of the
ceiling, a thermometer was automatically laid upon her heart.
She lay powerless. Cool pads soothed her forehead. Kuno had
telegraphed to her doctor.
So the human passions still blundered up and down in the
Machine. Vashti drank the medicine that the doctor projected
into her mouth, and the machinery retired into the ceiling.
The voice of Kuno was heard asking how she felt.
"Better." Then with irritation: "But why do
you not come to me instead?"
"Because I cannot leave this place."
"Why?"
"Because, any moment, something tremendous many happen."
"Have you been on the surface of the earth yet?"
"Not yet."
"Then what is it?"
"I will not tell you through the Machine."
She resumed her life.
But she thought of Kuno as a baby, his birth, his removal
to the public nurseries, her own visit to him there, his visits
to her-visits which stopped when the Machine had assigned
him a room on the other side of the earth. "Parents,
duties of," said the book of the Machine," cease
at the moment of birth. P.422327483." True, but there
was something special about Kuno - indeed there had been something
special about all her children - and, after all, she must
brave the journey if he desired it. And "something tremendous
might happen". What did that mean? The nonsense of a
youthful man, no doubt, but she must go. Again she pressed
the unfamiliar button, again the wall swung back, and she
saw the tunnel that curves out of sight. Clasping the Book,
she rose, tottered on to the platform, and summoned the car.
Her room closed behind her: the journey to the northern hemisphere
had begun.
Of course it was perfectly easy. The car approached and in
it she found armchairs exactly like her own. When she signaled,
it stopped, and she tottered into the lift. One other passenger
was in the lift, the first fellow creature she had seen face
to face for months. Few travelled in these days, for, thanks
to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all
over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization
had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was
the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury?
Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking?
Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated
in the soul.
The air-ship service was a relic form the former age. It
was kept up, because it was easier to keep it up than to stop
it or to diminish it, but it now far exceeded the wants of
the population. Vessel after vessel would rise form the vomitories
of Rye or of Christchurch (I use the antique names), would
sail into the crowded sky, and would draw up at the wharves
of the south - empty. so nicely adjusted was the system, so
independent of meteorology, that the sky, whether calm or
cloudy, resembled a vast kaleidoscope whereon the same patterns
periodically recurred. The ship on which Vashti sailed started
now at sunset, now at dawn. But always, as it passed above
Rheas, it would neighbour the ship that served between Helsingfors
and the Brazils, and, every third time it surmounted the Alps,
the fleet of Palermo would cross its track behind. Night and
day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer.
He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its
praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the
prattle of a child.
Yet as Vashti saw the vast flank of the ship, stained with
exposure to the outer air, her horror of direct experience
returned. It was not quite like the air-ship in the cinematophote.
For one thing it smelt - not strongly or unpleasantly, but
it did smell, and with her eyes shut she should have known
that a new thing was close to her. Then she had to walk to
it from the lift, had to submit to glances form the other
passengers. The man in front dropped his Book - no great matter,
but it disquieted them all. In the rooms, if the Book was
dropped, the floor raised it mechanically, but the gangway
to the air-ship was not so prepared, and the sacred volume
lay motionless. They stopped - the thing was unforeseen -
and the man, instead of picking up his property, felt the
muscles of his arm to see how they had failed him. Then some
one actually said with direct utterance: "We shall be
late" - and they trooped on board, Vashti treading on
the pages as she did so.
Inside, her anxiety increased. The arrangements were old-
fashioned and rough. There was even a female attendant, to
whom she would have to announce her wants during the voyage.
Of course a revolving platform ran the length of the boat,
but she was expected to walk from it to her cabin. Some cabins
were better than others, and she did not get the best. She
thought the attendant had been unfair, and spasms of rage
shook her. The glass valves had closed, she could not go back.
She saw, at the end of the vestibule, the lift in which she
had ascended going quietly up and down, empty. Beneath those
corridors of shining tiles were rooms, tier below tier, reaching
far into the earth, and in each room there sat a human being,
eating, or sleeping, or producing ideas. And buried deep in
the hive was her own room. Vashti was afraid.
"O Machine!" she murmured, and caressed her Book,
and was comforted.
Then the sides of the vestibule seemed to melt together,
as do the passages that we see in dreams, the lift vanished
, the Book that had been dropped slid to the left and vanished,
polished tiles rushed by like a stream of water, there was
a slight jar, and the air-ship, issuing from its tunnel, soared
above the waters of a tropical ocean.
It was night. For a moment she saw the coast of Sumatra edged
by the phosphorescence of waves, and crowned by lighthouses,
still sending forth their disregarded beams. These also vanished,
and only the stars distracted her. They were not motionless,
but swayed to and fro above her head, thronging out of one
sky-light into another, as if the universe and not the air-ship
was careening. And, as often happens on clear nights, they
seemed now to be in perspective, now on a plane; now piled
tier beyond tier into the infinite heavens, now concealing
infinity, a roof limiting for ever the visions of men. In
either case they seemed intolerable. "Are we to travel
in the dark?" called the passengers angrily, and the
attendant, who had been careless, generated the light, and
pulled down the blinds of pliable metal. When the air-ships
had been built, the desire to look direct at things still
lingered in the world. Hence the extraordinary number of skylights
and windows, and the proportionate discomfort to those who
were civilized and refined. Even in Vashti"s cabin one
star peeped through a flaw in the blind, and after a few hers"
uneasy slumber, she was disturbed by an unfamiliar glow, which
was the dawn.
Quick as the ship had sped westwards, the earth had rolled
eastwards quicker still, and had dragged back Vashti and her
companions towards the sun. Science could prolong the night,
but only for a little, and those high hopes of neutralizing
the earth"s diurnal revolution had passed, together with
hopes that were possibly higher. To "keep pace with the
sun," or even to outstrip it, had been the aim of the
civilization preceding this. Racing aeroplanes had been built
for the purpose, capable of enormous speed, and steered by
the greatest intellects of the epoch. Round the globe they
went, round and round, westward, westward, round and round,
amidst humanity"s applause. In vain. The globe went eastward
quicker still, horrible accidents occurred, and the Committee
of the Machine, at the time rising into prominence, declared
the pursuit illegal, unmechanical, and punishable by Homelessness.
Of Homelessness more will be said later.
Doubtless the Committee was right. Yet the attempt to "defeat
the sun" aroused the last common interest that our race
experienced about the heavenly bodies, or indeed about anything.
It was the last time that men were compacted by thinking of
a power outside the world. The sun had conquered, yet it was
the end of his spiritual dominion. Dawn, midday, twilight,
the zodiacal path, touched neither men"s lives not their
hearts, and science retreated into the ground, to concentrate
herself upon problems that she was certain of solving.
So when Vashti found her cabin invaded by a rosy finger of
light, she was annoyed, and tried to adjust the blind. But
the blind flew up altogether, and she saw through the skylight
small pink clouds, swaying against a background of blue, and
as the sun crept higher, its radiance entered direct, brimming
down the wall, like a golden sea. It rose and fell with the
air-ship"s motion, just as waves rise and fall, but it
advanced steadily, as a tide advances. Unless she was careful,
it would strike her face. A spasm of horror shook her and
she rang for the attendant. The attendant too was horrified,
but she could do nothing; it was not her place to mend the
blind. She could only suggest that the lady should change
her cabin, which she accordingly prepared to do.
People were almost exactly alike all over the world, but
the attendant of the air-ship, perhaps owing to her exceptional
duties, had grown a little out of the common. She had often
to address passengers with direct speech, and this had given
her a certain roughness and originality of manner. When Vashti
served away form the sunbeams with a cry, she behaved barbarically
- she put out her hand to steady her.
"How dare you!" exclaimed the passenger. "You
forget yourself!"
The woman was confused, and apologized for not having let
her fall. People never touched one another. The custom had
become obsolete, owing to the Machine.
"Where are we now?" asked Vashti haughtily.
"We are over Asia," said the attendant, anxious
to be polite.
"Asia?"
"You must excuse my common way of speaking. I have got
into the habit of calling places over which I pass by their
unmechanical names."
"Oh, I remember Asia. The Mongols came from it."
"Beneath us, in the open air, stood a city that was
once called Simla."
"Have you ever heard of the Mongols and of the Brisbane
school?"
"No."
"Brisbane also stood in the open air."
"Those mountains to the right - let me show you them."
She pushed back a metal blind. The main chain of the Himalayas
was revealed. "They were once called the Roof of the
World, those mountains."
"You must remember that, before the dawn of civilization,
they seemed to be an impenetrable wall that touched the stars.
It was supposed that no one but the gods could exist above
their summits. How we have advanced, thanks to the Machine!"
"How we have advanced, thanks to the Machine!"
said Vashti.
"How we have advanced, thanks to the Machine!"
echoed the passenger who had dropped his Book the night before,
and who was standing in the passage.
"And that white stuff in the cracks? - what is it?"
"I have forgotten its name."
"Cover the window, please. These mountains give me no
ideas."
The northern aspect of the Himalayas was in deep shadow:
on the Indian slope the sun had just prevailed. The forests
had been destroyed during the literature epoch for the purpose
of making newspaper-pulp, but the snows were awakening to
their morning glory, and clouds still hung on the breasts
of Kinchinjunga. In the plain were seen the ruins of cities,
with diminished rivers creeping by their walls, and by the
sides of these were sometimes the signs of vomitories, marking
the cities of to day. Over the whole prospect air-ships rushed,
crossing the inter-crossing with incredible aplomb, and rising
nonchalantly when they desired to escape the perturbations
of the lower atmosphere and to traverse the Roof of the World.
"We have indeed advance, thanks to the Machine,"
repeated the attendant, and his the Himalayas behind a metal
blind.
The day dragged wearily forward. The passengers sat each
in his cabin, avoiding one another with an almost physical
repulsion and longing to be once more under the surface of
the earth. There were eight or ten of them, mostly young males,
sent out from the public nurseries to inhabit the rooms of
those who had died in various parts of the earth. The man
who had dropped his Book was on the homeward journey. He had
been sent to Sumatra for the purpose of propagating the race.
Vashti alone was travelling by her private will.
At midday she took a second glance at the earth. The air-
ship was crossing another range of mountains, but she could
see little, owing to clouds. Masses of black rock hovered
below her, and merged indistinctly into grey. Their shapes
were fantastic; one of them resembled a prostrate man.
"No ideas here," murmured Vashti, and hid the Caucasus
behind a metal blind.
In the evening she looked again. They were crossing a golden
sea, in which lay many small islands and one peninsula. She
repeated, "No ideas here," and his Greece behind
a metal blind.
Part
II
|