CHAPTER X - THE DOMED BUILDING
“Arnold! Arnold!”
The funnel in the room was calling me, not in its customary strident tones, but with a muffled, intimate appeal.
David was at the Bureau, and Elizabeth had gone out on one of her infrequent journeys. It was as if the voice knew I was alone, for it had never spoken to me before, and had never called in that particular tone of intimacy and understanding.
“Arnold, I am your friend,” the voice continued. “You will come to no good in the Strangers’ House. Go out quietly by the external elevator at once and proceed toward the Temple, where everything will be explained to you.”
My bewilderment changed to intense expectancy. The Temple was, I knew, the domed building that seemed to dominate London; I had seen it from afar each time David and I had gone out together, and each time David had seemed sedulously to avoid approaching it, proceeding and returning in a circuitous manner.
“See for yourself the heritage of the new civilization,” the voice continued. “Do not allow yourself to be made a prisoner by those who wish you no good. Go out at once by the external elevator. Turn to the right. Walk slowly. Look about you. Your friends are watching you.”
I went out and descended the building by the external elevator. A minute later I was upon the traveling street, feeling like a runaway schoolboy, and animated by an intense desire to solve the secret that lay before me.
Presently, remembering that I was to proceed slowly, I had the curiosity to step off the traveling platform into a large, open space on which a crowd was seated. I took my post beside one of the funnels that surrounded it, and saw that I was at one of the moving picture performances. Spelling out the title upon the curtain, I understood that news from Russia was to be given.
There was none of that blur of vision which was a common defect of the old-fashioned pictures, and the words spoken from the funnels synchronized so perfectly with the actions on the screen that the illusion was complete. Upon the parapet of the fortress reared by our besieging troops I saw machines with conical tops, faced with large, glow-painted shields. As I watched, there rushed across the field of vision a number of men of the most degraded, savage aspect, armed with long swords, which they brandished furiously, while the funnels yelled like demons.
“These are the Russian savages, filthy defectives who are attacking the army of the Federation,” announced the funnel at my side, in such a personal way that I started, imagining for a moment that someone had spoken to me.
As the horde neared the fortress a short command was uttered, and from each of the conical machines a glare of light shot forth. The Russians wilted and crumpled up. They did not fall; they were rather consumed like lead dropped into fire, and the next line wilted too as the Ray caught them, tumbling in charred masses upon the bodies of their companions. Higher and higher rose the dreadful pyramid of mortality, until the field was empty.
“The victory of Science over Superstition,” announced each funnel simultaneously. “The Russians do not possess the Ray. They are degraded outcasts, refuse from the pre-civilization period, starving in Tula, and will all die unless they surrender soon. What a pity to have to destroy so much potential productivity! It is the Tsar’s fault. He is a dirty moron, full of germ life, and has never produced a hektone in his life. We shall next see him before the Council. Boss Lembken is on the job. Praise him!”
“Hurrah” yelled the spectators, rising in their seats to cheer.
The curtain darkened, and the next scene of the drama was displayed. It was laid in the Council Hall; but inasmuch as the Council was not in session, and the Tsar was not yet captured, it possessed a certain unreality for me which the audience did not seem to share. With considerable interest I watched the ten about the Council table. At the head sat a figure of enormous girth, dressed in white, with a black, or probably mull robe about the shoulders. The face, appalling in its grossness, must be that of Lembken, titular ruler of the Federation, a fat old man with huge paunch and shrunken throat, on which the sagging cheeks hung like a dewlap. A fit head for such a people!
Beside him sat a man of about the same age, perhaps sixty years, but lithe and lean and muscular, and with the keenest, cruelest face that I ever had seen. His whitening hair was brushed back from his forehead, and his expression was so full of sinister and malignant power that I knew this could be none other than Sanson, the devil of this devil’s world, who ruled the superstitious multitude by the terror of “Science become Faith,” as old Sir Spofforth had so aptly phrased it.
And, as I looked at him, I seemed to see the features of Herman Lazaroff, as he might have been in his old age. There was the same self-confidence, become arrogance, and self-assertion grown with power, the same demoniac energy and will, trained by its use upon a servile multitude. Thus Lazaroff might have been, if he could have had his wish to live again.
What struck me, as I gazed upon the strong, clean-shaven faces about the Council board, was that they seemed to reproduce the aspect and gestures of the degenerate emperors of Rome. Was history repeating itself; a state-fed mob, state-governed industries, the fist of autocracy beneath the glove of impotent democracy, and those terrific incarnations of cruelty and insane pride in power?
I saw the Tsar, a dwarfish, wretched figure in a tinsel crown, dragged, groveling, to Lembken’s feet, while Lembken assumed an attitude of inflexibility; and then once more the curtain darkened.
“Praise your Boss!” hooted the funnels. “He is the people’s friend. That’s how he deals with kings! He shows no mercy to the people’s enemies. The Tsar is a low-grade moron. His heredity is horrible. He cannot pass Test 1 upon the Binet board. He is a wretched brach, and will now work in the leathers till he dies, producing for you.”
“Hurrah!” screamed the spectators. “Out with him! To the Rest Cure!”
And the absurdity of the display came home to none except myself. These citizens were in deadly earnest. How shrewd the mind that had contrived a pabulum so well calculated to appeal to the mob palate! The contrived crudeness, the planned abuse betrayed an intimate and assured acquaintance with the people’s psychology.
“Praise louder!” whispered the intimate voice beside me. “Why do you not praise when the others do?”
And then I realized that the funnel was speaking to me! Nobody else had heard, nobody else was meant to hear. I knew that the funnels had a tele-photophonic attachment whereby one could see as well as hear. Somewhere, then, the person who had spoken to me that morning was watching and playing with me. For an instant I felt caught in a trap.
“You do not seem to be an admirer of Boss Lembken,” said a voice upon my other side; and I swung around to see a little, sallow man in blue, with a plank badge on his shoulder, indicating that he was a carpenter. “I see you are a stranger,” he continued, with a glance at my gray uniform. “What do you think of London?”
“I have not seen much of it as yet,” I answered, remembering David’s warning.
“Ah, you are diplomatic,” he returned suavely. “One has to be diplomatic in these days, do you not think? You are of the same opinion as many of us, only you lack the courage to say it, that certain features of our civilization are over-developed. Now let us take Doctor Sanson, for instance—do you not consider that he is pushing his prosecution of morons to undue lengths? Has he not, in other words, a mania about them?”
“I think,” I answered, hotly, “that a man whose chief amusement consists in torturing his fellow-men needs to have his own mentality investigated.”
“A worthy sentiment,” answered the little man, nodding his head briskly. “In short, you are with us on that subject. And as for Lembken?”
“I know nothing of him,” I answered shortly.
“No, of course not. You are wise not to commit yourself,” said the little man eagerly. “One must not pass judgment without investigation. But still, our democracy has, in some respects, retained the features of the old despotisms, do you not think? And then, do you consider that the people are really omnipotent?”
He cocked his head as he spoke, and he had the objectionable habit of thrusting his face forward, so that he had been forcing me, step by step, around the circumference of a circle.
“The truth is, you say, we are actually in a condition of slavery,” he persisted. “We are no better off than our ancestors, for all our boast of civilization. Is that not so, to your way of thinking?”
“You are very quick,” I answered, “to put words into my mouth before I speak them.”
“But you think them. Don’t you think them?” he urged, cocking his head again and watching me with intense eagerness.
The little man had ceased crowding me, and suddenly I saw that he had contrived to have me speak almost into the mouth of the funnel. It was only then that the meaning of his pertinacity and of his repulsive trade grew clear to me.
“Take yourself away!” I cried in anger.
“Oh, certainly! By all means! Yap, yap, if you wish it,” he answered, drawing back and watching me with a sarcastic smile.
I went upon my way, filled with indignation. I wondered whether the Council was watching me before summoning me, and why they attributed so much importance to my views. I stared about me at the streets and the crowds, the dazzling fronts of the high buildings, and even then I half believed that this was a dream. Life could not have grown so accursed as this.
Before I became aware of it I had drawn near to the domed building, toward which the street was running. The houses suddenly fell away, and the splendid structure, which had seemed to float above the house-tops elusively, revealed itself to me. I was near the summit of a rather steep hill, whose superior portion consisted of a smooth glacis composed of neatly-jointed stones, across which the converging streets moved toward the castellated fortification, each terminating before a gate in this wall. The gate in front of me was composed of huge blocks of stone, probably with a steel foundation, and swung upon thin hinges of some metal that must have had enormous tensile strength. It was open and, like the fortification, was covered with glow paint or plaster, a dazzling mirror, now white, now blue, and bright as sunlight. Above the wall were the great conical, glow-painted Ray guns.
I passed through the gateway under a massive arch. Now I saw that the double wall enclosed a barracks or circular fortress, surrounding the inner courtyard, and connected with the dome by long bridges, stretched upon arches. The court within was laid out in grass plots, and was most spacious.
I stood still and gazed in admiration at the stupendous architectural scheme of the great building that occupied the center of the circular space. The dome covered only a small portion of the entire mass, and on each side was a succession of halls and porticos, approached between Corinthian columns, and, I thought, intercommunicating. The part immediately beneath the dome appeared to be of older date than the rest, and formed the nucleus of the complete conception.
As I stood staring in astonishment, suddenly I knew what the domed building was. It was St. Paul’s Cathedral; but the cross was gone.
My wonder grew as I watched it. The dome designed by Sir Christopher Wren remained intact; yet it no longer rested on the summit, but seemed to soar, supported on numerous low pillars, and, twenty feet beneath it, on a flat under-roof, was a garden of luxuriating palm trees, and therefore presumably enclosed by invisible crystal walls. I saw the gorgeous coloring of tropical flowers, and scarlet creepers that twined around the trunks of old trees. What a magnificent pleasure-ground for the Council of the Federated Provinces, high up above the London streets in the December weather!
An elderly, bent man in blue, with the sign of a hammer on his shoulder, came slowly toward me.
“Can one obtain a permit to go to the Council garden?” I inquired of him.
He stopped and looked dully at me. “Eh?” he inquired.
“I want to go up and see the aerial garden,” I responded, pointing.
“You want to go up there?” he exclaimed, and then began to chuckle. He slapped first one knee and then the other.
“Ho! Ho!” he roared. “That’s good. But listen! You don’t know who you’re talking to. My daughter lives up there. I’ll never see her again, but I like to walk here and look up and think about my luck. It gives me standing. I’ve got to earn a hektone and a quarter monthly, haven’t I? But I tell you I don’t earn fifty ones a month, and I lay off when I want to, and there’s not a Labor Boss dares say a word to me. And down I go on the register for my hektone and a quarter every month, as sure as the sun rises.”
His hard, shrewd laughter convulsed him again, and he slapped his legs and leered at me. Then he drew closer to me and laid his hand on my arm confidentially.
“You’ve heard of this new freedom the people are whispering about?” he asked, glancing apprehensively about him. “They’re never satisfied, the people aren’t. They want to get back to the old, bad ways of a hundred years ago, when there wasn’t food to go around, and the rich sucked the poor men dry. I’ve read about those days. But the people are forgetting. Sanson will crush them when they’re ready to break out. Do you know what they want? Do you? Do you?
“They want God back again, after we’ve put him down. They want their heaven after their rotten hides are turned into fertilizer. I know. I know those Christians. London’s full of them today. The defective shops are full of them. They’re talking and planning for an uprising that will turn back the hands of the clock. But Sanson will oust them when he gets ready. He’ll give them the Rest Cure.
“They say there’s a Messiah coming to mate the Temple goddess and bring back the old, bad days. Do you know what Sanson means to do? He’s going to mate her himself. And then he’s going to make us all immortal. We’ll have our heaven on earth then, and keep our bodies too. What’s the use of a heaven when you haven’t a body to enjoy it with? Sanson will make us all young again. We don’t want freedom, we want immortality.”
I was so astonished by his gabbling that I remained silent after he had ended, not knowing how to answer him. He began scanning me slowly from my feet upward.
“You’re a stranger,” he said, with slow suspicion.
“Yes,” I replied. “Now tell me how I can go up to the Council garden.”
“Garden,” he replied, in apparent stupefaction. “Don’t you know that’s Boss Lembken’s palace? That’s the People’s House, where Boss Lembken lives. People can’t go up there. Don’t you know that’s the People’s House? Who are you?”
Suddenly he started back and a malignant look came over his face.
“You’re a wipe!” he shrieked. “You want to trap me and send me to the Comfortable Bedroom because I’m too old to work. Never a month passes but I put up my hektone and a quarter. Look on the register. You want to switch an old man who minds his own business and puts up his hektone and a quarter, you rotten moron!”
His old face worked with fear and excitement, and he raised his fist in a threatening manner; then, suddenly changing his intention, he swung on his heel and hurried away toward the gate. I saw him glance back furtively at me and then increase his speed.
As I turned to look at him I perceived that a small wooden gate on the interior side of the circular fortification stood partly open, and inside I saw a troop of the international guards at drill.
I crossed the court and came to a halt before the Corinthian columns that I had seen; and now I perceived that the pedestal of each contained a bas-relief, a conventionalized figure beneath which was engraved a tribute to some great leader of mankind. The engravings were in the old Roman characters, which seemed to have been retained on statues, coins, and brasses, just as we in our day still inscribed coins and statue pedestals in Latin. I walked around the columns, reading these inscriptions.
The first that caught my eye was in honor of Darwin, and read simply, “The Father of Civilization.”
The next was to Karl Marx. “He interpreted history in the light of materialism, and gave us the social State, with food for all,” I read.
There was one in honor of Wells, “the Prophet of the Race.”
There was one to Weismann, “who gave us immortality, not in a ghostly heaven, but in the germ-plasm.”
The next was to Mendel, who had “interpreted man’s destiny in terms of the pea.” Poor, patient, toiling Abbot, what were you doing in this galaxy?
And there was one to Nietzsche, “the scourge of Jesus of Nazareth, a peasant god.”
