City of Endless Night, Milo Hastings [books to get back into reading .TXT] 📗

a hospital ward at night. I hurried silently along, shut in by enclosing walls and the lowering ceiling of the street. From everywhere I seemed to feel upon me the beseeching, haunting grey eyes of Frau Matilda. My soul was troubled, for it seemed to stagger beneath the burden of its realization of a lost humanity. And with me walked grey shadows of other men, felt-footed through the gloom, and they walked hurriedly as men fleeing from a house of death. ~6~

My next duty as a German father-elect was to report to the Eugenic Office. There at least I could deal with men; and there I went, nursing rebellion yet trying my utmost to appear outwardly calm.

To the clerk I offered my three signed cards by way of introduction.

"And which do you select?" asked the oldish man over his rimless glasses.

"None."

"Ah, but you must."

"But what if I refuse to do so?"

"That is most unusual."

"But does it ever happen?"

"Well, yes," admitted the clerk, "but only by Petition Extraordinary to the Chief of the Staff. But it is most unusual, and if he refuses to grant it you may be dishonoured even to the extent of having your election to paternity suspended, may be even permanently cancelled."

"You mean"--I stammered.

"Exactly--you refuse to accept any one of the three women when all are most scientifically selected for you. Does it not throw some doubts upon your own psychic fitness for mating at all? If I may suggest, Herr Colonel--it would be wiser for you to select some one of the three--you have yet plenty of time."

"No," I said, trying to hide my elation. "I will not do so. I will make the Petition Extraordinary to your chief."

"Now?" stammered the clerk.

"Yes, now; how do I go about it?"

"You must first consult the Investigator."

After a few formalities I was conducted to that official.

"You refuse to make selection?" inquired the Investigator.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because," I replied, "I am engaged upon some chemical research of most unusual nature--"

"Yes," nodded the Investigator, "I have just looked that up. The more reason you should be honoured with paternity."

"Perhaps," I said, "you are not informed of the grave importance of the research. If you will consult Herr von Uhl of the Chemical Staff--"

"Entirely unnecessary," he retorted; "paternity is also important. Besides it takes but little time. No more than you need for recreation."

"But I do not find it recreation. I have not been able to concentrate my mind on my work since I received notice of my election to paternity."

"But you were warned against this," he said; "you have no right to permit the development of disturbing romantic emotions. They may be bad for your work, but they are worse for eugenics. So, if you have made romantic love to the mothers of Berlin, your case must be investigated."

"But I have not."

"Then why has this disturbed you?"

"Because," I replied, "this system of scientific paternity offends my instincts."

The investigator ogled me craftily. "What system would you prefer instead?" he asked.

I saw he was trying to trap me into disloyal admissions. "I have nothing to propose," I stated. "I only know that I find the paternity system offensive to me, and that the position I am placed in incapacitates me for my work."

The investigator made some notes on a pad.

"That is all for the present," he said. "I will refer your case to the Chief."

Two days later I received an order to report at once to Dr. Ludwig Zimmern, Chief of the Eugenic Staff.

The Chief, with whom I was soon cloistered, was a man of about sixty years. His face revealed a greater degree of intelligence than I had yet observed among the Germans, nor was his demeanour that of haughty officiousness, for a kindly warmth glowed in his soft dark eyes.

"I have a report here," said Dr. Zimmern, "from my Investigator. He recommends that your rights of paternity be revoked on the grounds that he believes yours to be a case of atavistic radicalism. In short he thinks you are rebellious by instinct, and that you are therefore unsafe to father the coming generation. It is part of the function of this office to breed the rebellious instinct out of the German race. What have you to say in answer to these charges?"

"I do not want to seem rebellious," I stammered, "but I wish to be relieved of this duty."

"Very well," said Zimmern, "you may be relieved. If you have no objection I will sign the recommendation as it stands."

Surely, I thought, this man does not seem very bitter toward my traitorous instincts.

Zimmern smiled and eyed me curiously. "You know," he said, "that to possess a thought and to speak of it indiscreetly are two different things."

"Certainly," I replied, emboldened by his words. "A man cannot do original work in science if he possesses a mind that never thinks contrary to the established order of things."

The clerks in the outer office must have thought my case a grievous one for I was closeted with their chief for nearly an hour. Though our conversation was vague and guarded, I knew that I had discovered in Dr. Ludwig Zimmern, Chief of the Eugenic Staff, a man guilty himself of the very crime of possessing rebellious instincts for which he had decided me unfit to sire German children. And when I finally took my leave I carried with me his private card and an invitation to call at his apartment to continue our conversation.

~7~

In the weeks that followed, my acquaintance with the Chief of the Eugenic Staff ripened rapidly into a warm friendship. The frank manner in which he revealed his dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in Germany pleased me greatly. Zimmern was interested in my chemical researches and quickly comprehended their importance.

"I know so little of chemistry," he deplored, "yet on it our whole life hangs. That is why I am so glad of an opportunity to talk to you. I do not approve of so much ignorance of each other's work on the part of our scientists. Our old university system was better. Then a scientist in any field knew something of the science in all fields. But now we are specialized from childhood. Take, for example, yourself. You are at work on a great problem by which all of our labour stands to be undone if you chemists do not solve it, and yet you do not understand how we will all be undone. I think you should know more of what it means, then you will work better. Is it not so?"

"Perhaps," I said, "but I have little time. I am working too hard now."

"Then," said Zimmern, "you should spend more time in pleasure on the Free Level. Two days ago I conferred with the Emperor's Advisory Staff, and I learned that grave changes are threatened. That is one reason I am so interested in this protium on which you chemists are working. If you do not solve this problem and replenish the food supply, the Emperor has decided that the whole Free Level with its five million women must be abolished. His Majesty will have no half-way measures. He is afraid to take part of these women away, lest the intellectual workers rebel like the labourers did in the last century when their women were taken away piecemeal."

"But what will His Majesty do with these five million women?" I inquired, eagerly desirous to learn more.

"Do? What can he do with the women?" exclaimed Dr. Zimmern in a low pitched but vibrant voice. "He thinks he will make workers of them. He does not seem to appreciate how specialized they are for pleasure. He will make machine tenders of them to relieve the workmen, who are to be made soldiers. He would make surface soldiers out of these blind moles of the earth, put amber glasses on them and train them to run on the open ground and carry the war again into the sunlight. It is folly, sheer folly, and madness. His Majesty, I fear, reads too much of old books. He always was historically inclined."

On a later occasion Zimmern gave me the broad outlines of the history of German Eugenics.

"Our science of applied Eugenics," he said, "began during the Second World War. Our scientists had long known that the same laws of heredity by which plants and animals had been bred held true with man, but they had been afraid to apply those laws to man because the religion of that day taught that men had souls and that human life was something too sacred to be supervised by science. But William III was a very fearless man, and he called the scientists together and asked them to outline a plan for the perfection of the German race.

"At first all they advocated was that paternity be restricted to the superior men. This broke up the old-fashioned family where every man chose his own wife and sired as many children as he liked. There were great mutterings about that, and if we had not been at war, there would have been rebellion. The Emperor told the people it was a military necessity. The death toll of war then was great and there was urgent need to increase the birth rate, so the people submitted and women soon ceased to complain because they could no longer have individual husbands. The children were supported by the state, and if they had legitimate fathers of the approved class they were left in the mothers' care. As all women who were normal and healthy were encouraged to bear children, there was a great increase in the birth rate, which came near resulting in the destruction of the race by starvation.

"As soon as a sufficient number of the older generation that had believed in the religious significance of the family and marriage system had died out, the ambitious eugenists set about to make other reforms. The birth rate was cut down by restricting the privilege of motherhood to a selected class of women. The other women were instructed in the arts of pleasing man and avoiding maternity, and that is where we have the origin of our free women. In those days they were free to associate with men of all classes. Indeed any other plan would at first have been impossible.

"A second fault was that the superior men for whom paternity was permitted were selected from the official and intellectual classes. The result was that the quality of the labourers deteriorated. So two strains were established, the one for the production of the intellectual workers, and the other for producing manual workers. From time to time this specialization has increased until now we have as many strains of inheritance as there are groups of useful characteristics known to be hereditary.

"We have produced some effects," mused Zimmern, "which were not anticipated, and which have been calling forth considerable criticism. His Majesty sends me memorandums nearly every year, after he reviews the maternity levels, insisting that the feminine beauty of the race is, as a whole, deteriorating. And yet this is logical enough. With the exception of our small actor-model strain, the characteristics for which we breed have only the most incidental relation to feminine beauty. The type of the labour female is, as you have seen, a buxom, fleshly beauty; youth and full nutrition are essential to its display, and it soon fades. In the scientific strains it seems that the power of original thought correlates with a feminine type that is certainly not beautiful. Doubtless not understanding this you may have felt that you were discriminated against in your assignment. But the clerical mind with its passion for monotonous repetition of petty mental processes seems to correlate with the most exquisite and refined feminine features. Those scintillating beauties on the Free Level who have ever at their beck our wisest men are from our clerical strain,--but of course they are only the rejects. It is unfortunate that you cannot see the more privileged specimens in the clerical maternity level.

"But I digress to that which is of no consequence. The beauty of women is unimportant but the number of women is very important. When some women were specialized for motherhood then there were surplus women. At first they made workers of them. The war was then conducted on a larger scale than now. We had not yet fully specialized the soldier class. All the young men went to war; and, when they came back and went to work, they became bitterly jealous of the women workers and made an outcry that those who could not fight should not work. The men workers drove the women from industry, hoping thereby each to possess a mistress. As a result the great number of unproductive women was a drain upon the state. All sorts of schemes were proposed to reduce the number of female births but most of these were unscientific. In studying