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

the records it was found that the offspring of certain men were predominantly males. By applying this principle of selection we have, with successive generations, been able to reduce the proportion of female births to less than half the old rate.

"But the sexual impulse of the labourers made them restless and rebellious, and the support of the free women for these millions of workers was a great economic waste. When animals had been bred to large size and great strength their sexuality had decreased, while their power as beasts of burden increased. The same principle applied to man has resulted in more docile workers. By beginning with the soldiers and mine workers, who were kept away from women, and by combining proper training with the hereditary selection, we solved that problem and removed all knowledge of women from the minds of the workmen."

"But how about paternity among the workers?" I asked.

"Those who are selected are removed to special isolated quarters. They are told they are being taken to serve as His Majesty's body guard; and they never go back to mingle with their fellows."

I then related for the doctor my conversation with the workman who asked me about women.

"So," said Zimmern, "there has been a leak somewhere; knowledge is hard to bottle. Still we have bottled most of it and the labourer accepts his loveless lot. But it could not be done with the intellectual worker."

Dr. Zimmern smiled cynically. "At least," he added, "we don't propose to admit that it can be done. And that, Col. Armstadt, is what I was remarking about the other evening. Unless you chemists can solve the protium problem, Germany must cut her population swiftly, if we do not starve out altogether. His Majesty's plan to turn the workmen into soldiers and make workers of the free women will not solve it. It is too serious for that. The Emperor's talk about the day being at hand is all nonsense. He knows and we know that these mongrel herds, as he calls the outside enemy, are not so degenerate.

"We may have improved the German stock in some ways by our scientific breeding, but science cannot do much in six generations, and what we have accomplished, I as a member of the Eugenist Staff, can assure you has really been attained as much by training as by breeding, though the breeding is given the credit. Our men are highly specialized, and once outside the walls of Berlin they will find things so different that this very specialization will prove a handicap. The mongrel peoples are more adaptable. Our workmen and soldiers are large in physique, but dwarfed of intellect. The enemy will beat us in open war, and, even if we should be victorious in war, we could not rule them. Either we solve this food business or we all turn soldiers and go out into the blinding sunlight and die fighting."

I ventured as a wild remark: "At least, if we get outside there will be plenty of women."

The older man looked at me with the superiority of age towards youth. "Young man," he said, "you have not read history; you do not understand this love and family doctrine; it exists in the outside world today just as it did two centuries ago. The Germans in the days of the old surface wars made too free with the enemy's women, and that is why they ran us into cover here and penned us up. These mongrel people will fight for their women when they will fight for nothing else. We have not bred all the lust out of our workmen either. It is merely dormant. Once they are loosed in the outer world they will not understand this thing and they will again make free with the enemy's women, and then we shall all be exterminated."

Dr. Zimmern got up and filled a pipe with synthetic tobacco and puffed energetically as he walked about the room. "What do you say about this protium ore?" he asked; "will you be able to solve the problem?"

"Yes," I said, "I think I shall."

"I hope so," replied my host, "and yet sometimes I do not care; somehow I want this thing to come to an end. I want to see what is outside there. I think, perhaps, I would like to fly.

"What troubles me is that I do not see how we can ever do it. We have bred and trained our race into specialization and stupidity. We wouldn't know how to go out and join this World State if they would let us."

Dr. Zimmern paced the room in silence for a time. "Do you know," he said, "I should like to see a negro, a black man with kinky hair--it must be queer."

"Yes," I answered, "there must be many queer things out there."

CHAPTER VI IN WHICH I LEARN THAT COMPETITION IS STILL THE LIFE OF THE OLDEST TRADE IN THE WORLD ~1~

When I told Dr. Zimmern that I should solve the problem of the increase of the supply of protium I may have been guilty of speaking of hopes as if they were certainties. My optimism was based on the discovery that the exact chemical state of the protium in the ore was unknown, and that it did not exist equally in all samples of the ore.

After some further months of labour I succeeded in determining the exact chemical ingredients of the ore, and from this I worked rapidly toward a new process of extraction that would greatly increase the total yield of the precious element. But this fact I kept from my assistants whose work I directed to futile researches while I worked alone after hours in following up the lead I had discovered.

During the progress of this work I was not always in the laboratory. I had become a not infrequent visitor to the Level of the Free Women. The continuous carnival of amusement had an attraction for me, as it must have had for any tired and lonely man. But it was not merely the lure of sensuous pleasures that appealed to me, for I was also fascinated with the deeper and more tragic aspect of life beneath the gaudy surface of hectic joy.

Some generalities I had picked up from observation and chance conversations. As a primary essential to life on the level I had quickly learned that money was needed, and my check book was in frequent demand. The bank provided an aluminum currency for the pettier needs of the recreational life, but neither the checks nor the currency had had value on other levels, since there all necessities were supplied without cost and luxuries were unobtainable. This strange retention of money circulation and general freedom of personal conduct exclusively on the Free Level puzzled me. Thus I found that food and drink were here available for a price, a seeming contradiction to the strict limitations of the diet served me at my own quarters. At first it seemed I had discovered a way to defeat that limitation--but there was the weigher to be considered.

It was a queer ensemble, this life in the Black Utopia of Berlin, a combination of a world of rigid mechanistic automatism in the regular routine of living with rioting individual license in recreational pleasure. The Free Level seemed some ancient Bagdad, some Bourbon Court, some Monte Carlo set here, an oasis of flourishing vice in a desert of sterile law-made, machine-executed efficiency and puritanically ordered life. Aided by a hundred ingenious wheels and games of chance, men and women gambled with the coin and credit of the level. These games were presided over by crafty women whose years were too advanced to permit of a more personal means of extracting a living from the grosser passions of man. Some of these aged dames were, I found, quite highly regarded and their establishments had become the rendezvous for many younger women who by some arrangement that I could not fathom plied their traffic in commercialized love under the guidance of these subtler women who had graduated from the school of long experience in preying upon man.

But only the more brilliant women could so establish themselves for the years of their decline. There were others, many others, whose beauty had faded without an increase in wit, and these seemed to be serving their more fortunate sisters, both old and young, in various menial capacities. It was a strange anachronism in this world where men's more weighty affairs had been so perfectly socialized, to find woman retaining, evidently by men's permission, the individualistic right to exploit her weaker sister.

The thing confounded me, and yet I recalled the well known views of our sociological historians who held that it was woman's greater individualism that had checked the socialistic tendencies of the world. Had the Germans then achieved and maintained their rigid socialistic order by retaining this incongruous vestige of feminine commercialism as a safety valve for the individualistic instincts of the race?

They called it the Free Level, and I marvelled at the nature of this freedom. Freedom for licentiousness, for the getting and losing of money at the wheels of fortune, freedom for temporary gluttony and the mild intoxication of their flat, ill-flavoured synthetic beer. A tragic symbol it seemed to me of the ignobility of man's nature, that he will be a slave in all the loftier aspects of living if he can but retain his freedom for his vices and corruptions. Had the Germans then, like the villain of the moral play, a necessary part in the tragedy of man; did they exist to show the other races of the earth the way they should not go? But the philosophy of this conception collapsed when I recalled that for more than a century the world had lost all sight of the villain and yet had not in the least deteriorated from a lack of the horrible example.

From these vaguer speculations concerning the Free Level of Berlin that existed like a malformed vestigial organ in the body of that socialized state, my mind came back to the more human, more personal side of the problem thus presented me. I wanted to know more of the lives of these women who maintained Germany's remnant of individualism.

To what extent, I asked myself, have the true instincts of womanhood and the normal love of man and child been smothered out of the lives of these girls? What secret rebellions are they nursing in their hearts? I wondered, too, from what source they came, and why they were selected for this life, for Zimmern had not adequately enlightened me on this point.

Pondering thus on the secret workings in the hearts of these girls, I sat one evening amid the sensuous beauty of the Hall of Flowers. I marvelled at how little the Germans seemed to appreciate it, for it was far less crowded than were the more tawdry places of revelry. Here within glass encircling walls, preserved through centuries of artificial existence, feeding from pots of synthetic soil and stimulated by perpetual light, marvellous botanical creations flourished and flowered in prodigal profusion. Ponderous warm-hued lilies floated on the sprinkled surface of the fountain pool. Orchids, dangling from the metal lattice, hung their sensuous blossoms in vapour-laden air. Luxurious vines, climatized to this unreal world, clambered over cosy arbours, or clung with gripping fingers to the mossy concrete pillars.

~2~

I was sitting thus in moody silence watching the play of the fountain, when, through the mist, I saw the lonely figure of a girl standing in the shadows of a viny bower. She was toying idly with the swaying tendrils. Her hair was the unfaded gold of youth. Her pale dress of silvery grey, unmarred by any clash of colour, hung closely about a form of wraith-like slenderness.

I arose and walked slowly toward her. As I approached she turned toward me a face of flawless girlish beauty, and then as quickly turned away as if seeking a means of escape.

"I did not mean to intrude," I said.

She did not answer, but when I turned to go, to my surprise, she stepped forward and walked at my side.

"Why do you come here alone?" she asked shyly, lifting a pensive questioning face.

"Because I am tired of all this tawdry noise. But you," I said, "surely you are not tired of it? You cannot have been here long."

"No," she replied, "I have not. Only thirty days"; and her blue eyes gleamed with childish pride.

"And that is why you seem so different from them all?"

Timidly she placed her hand upon my arm. "So you," she said gratefully, "you understand that I am not like them-that is, not yet."

"You do not act like them," I replied, "and what is more, you act as if you did not want to be like them. It surely cannot be merely that you are new here. The other girls when they come seem so