Chapter 2

The apartment was hardly very different from what I had unconsciously expected. It seemed to have two rooms and a bath. The room we entered was a sort of study. It was hung with drapes closely woven from some light metal, with cold designs that were suggestive of mechanical, mathematic conceptions, but inspiring in much the way that the lines of the building were inspiring. There were no pictures and no mirrors. All the furniture was made in straight lines, of metal, and somewhat futuristic in design. The chairs, however, were deep and comfortable, although the yielding upholstery appeared at first sight hard and brittle as metal sheets. The room was perfectly bare, and the color scheme a dull silver and black. To me it seemed extremely somber, but it pleased Edvar and his companion.

The first thing I noted when we sat down was the absence of any small articles--books or papers or lamps--and I remarked on this, somewhat rudely perhaps, to Edvar.

"Whatever you wish is accessible," he explained with a smile. He rose and went to the draped wall. Drawing back the folds of the curtains in several places, he showed the metal wall covered with dials and apparatus. I noted especially a small screen, like a motion picture screen. Later I was to find that it served not only for amusement, showing sound-pictures projected automatically from a central office, but also for news and for communication, like a telephone.

"Would you care for breakfast?" Edvar asked me. I accepted eagerly, and he manipulated some dials on the wall. A moment or two later a small section of the wall opened, and a tray appeared. Edvar placed it on the table by my chair.

"We have had our breakfast," he explained, and I began to eat with a keener appetite than I thought I had. It was a simple meal with a slightly exotic flavor, but without any strange dishes. During the course of it, I asked Edvar questions.

"Your life is amazingly centralized," I said. "Apparently all the things you need are supplied at your rooms on a moment's notice."

"Yes," he smiled, "it makes life simpler. We have very few needs. Many of them are satisfied while we sleep, such as cleansing and, if we like, nourishment. We can study while we sleep, acquiring facts that we may want to use later from an instrument which acts upon the subconscious mind. These dials you see are mainly to give us pleasure. If we care to have our meals served in the old-fashioned way, as you are having yours, we can do so, but we reserve those meals for the occasions when we feel the need of eating as a pure sensation. We can have music at any time--" He paused. "Would you care for some music?"

"There's nothing I'd like better," I told him. He went to the wall and turned the dials again. In a moment the room was filled with the subdued sound of a cool, melancholy music--Grieg, or some other composer, with whom I was unfamiliar, exotic and reminiscent in mood, cool, and quiet with a touch of acutely sweet pain. I listened to it in silence for a while. It was so subtle and pervasive, however, that it seemed to play directly upon the subconscious mind, so that the listener could go on thinking and talking uninterruptedly without losing any of the feeling of the melody.

* * * * *

"Have you no private possessions?" I asked. "Things that you share with no one? Your own books, your own music, your own jewelry, perhaps?"

"We have no need of them," he replied. After a moment's thought, he added, "We have our own emotions, and our own work--that's all. We do not care for jewels, or for decoration for its own sake. The things we use and see daily are beautiful in themselves, through their perfect utility and their outward symbolism of utility and creation. Our tools and our furniture are beautiful according to our own conceptions of beauty--as you can see." He made a gesture about the room.

"And who serves you with those meals, and the music, and the knowledge you learn in your sleep? Who does the work?"

"We all do the work. Each of us has his own work. Each of us is a craftsman and a creative artist. The real work is done by machine--our machines are the basic structure of our life. But we have men, highly trained and fitted temperamentally for their professions, who watch and direct the machines. It is a matter of a few hours a day, devoted to fine problems in mechanics or building or invention. The rest of our time is our own, and the machines go on moving automatically as we have directed them to move. If every man on earth should die this morning, it would be perhaps fifty years or a century before the last machine stopped turning."

"And the rest of the time?"

It was Selda who answered this time. "We live. We devote ourselves to learning and creative thought. We study human relations, or we wander through the forests and the mountains, increasing the breadth and significance of our minds and emotions." Selda's voice, rising suddenly after her long silence, startled me, and I looked at her, disturbed again by some subtle attraction exercised over me by her body. We were silent a while, then I relapsed into my inner questionings, and turned to Edvar.

"You must live under a sort of socialistic system," I said thoughtfully. "Even a sort of communism?"

"In a sense. Rather it is an automatic life. The soul of the machine pervades us all, and the machines are beautiful. Our lives are logically and inevitably directed by environment and heredity just as the machines are inevitably directed by their functions and capabilities. When a child is born, we know already what he will do throughout his life, how long he will live, what sort of children he will have, the woman he will marry. The Bureau could tell you at this moment when my great-grandson will be born, when he will die, and what his life will do for the State. There are never any accidents in our lives."

* * * * *

"But how did you develop so highly technical a civilization?" I asked.

"We came to it gradually from the last government system. It was called the _phrenarchic system_--the rule of the mind. It was neither democracy nor monarchy nor dictatorship. We found that we could tell the temperament and characteristics of a child from his early years, and we trained certain children for government. They were given power according to the qualities of their minds and according to the tasks for which they were fitted. We even bred them for governing. Later, when the machine began to usurp the place of labor all over the world and gave men freedom and peace and beauty, the task of government dwindled away little by little, and the phrenarchs turned gradually to other occupations."

* * * * *

I learned innumerable details of that life from Edvar, and occasionally Selda would add some fact. They are not important now. It is the narrative which I must tell, not the details of a social system which, as I would discover later, was purely hypothetical.

The three of us spent the morning in conversation there, until the entrance of another man I had not seen before. He came in without knocking, but Edvar and Selda did not seem to be surprised. He was the representative of the Bureau.

"You are Baret?" he said, looking at me keenly.

"Yes," I replied.

"I have been directed to tell you that your visit here is temporary, and that you will be returned to your previous life at the end of a certain period of time which we have not yet calculated precisely. You have been registered with the Bureau, and you are free to come and go as you see fit, but you are not to interfere with anything you see. You are an observer. You will be expected to comply with our methods of living as Edvar or Selda will explain them to you."

With a slight bow, he turned to go. But I detained him.

"Wait," I said. "Can you tell me who I am, and where I've come from?"

"We are not yet certain. Our knowledge of you has come to us in an unusual manner, through a series of new experiments now being conducted at the Bureau. If possible, we will explain them to you later. In any case you may be assured that your absence from your usual life will not cause you any harm, and that you will return after a definite time. Rest here, and keep your mind at peace. You will be safe."

Then he turned and left. I was puzzled for a while, but I forgot that shortly in the strangeness and wonder of the life I was living in a strange world....

* * * * *

And the lake? Melbourne?

The Grieg nocturne came to an end. I frowned as I set down my razor, and went into the living room to change the record. Conflicting memories ... where did they meet? On the one hand was the awakening in the cold waters of the lake--only an hour or less than an hour ago. And there was Melbourne, and the strange conversation at the Club. Finally there was this amazing and isolated recollection, like a passage from a dream.

Suddenly, as I went back to my bath and plunged into the cool water, my mind returned to Melbourne. I had been walking home with him that night from the Club--perhaps last night. We had gone on a while in silence, both of us thinking. Then we had come to the Drive. At that moment Melbourne had said something--what was it?

He had said, "Tell me, Mr. Barrett, would you care to see that dream of yours come true?"

The Chamber of Life

I didn't know what Melbourne meant, and I looked at him inquiringly.

He explained: "I have in my home a model--or rather a complete test-apparatus. It was finished only a few days ago. I have been postponing my trial of it from day to day, afraid that it might be a failure--although, of course, it can't be. I have verified my work dozens of times, step by step.

"If you care to see it, I should be glad to have you come with me. Now that I have reached the end of my search, I need someone to share my triumph with me." I glanced at him eagerly, but hardly understanding that his offer was serious.

"But, Mr. Melbourne," I said, "why have you chosen me--a man you've only met this evening?" He smiled.

"I am a lonely man, almost a recluse, Mr. Barrett," he answered. "I have many friends in many countries--but no intimates. It is the penalty of a man's devotion to one single and absorbing task. And, too, I think you share a little of my interest in this particular task."

"I do, sir! It has fascinated me," I said.

"Then come along. I shall soon be an old man, and I will need someone to carry on this work as I should carry it on. Perhaps you will be that man."

A taxi was coming up the Drive at that moment. Melbourne hailed it, and held the door for me to enter. Then he gave the driver an address which I didn't hear, and climbed in after me.

"This will be quicker," he said. "After all, I am more excited about it myself than I should care to admit."

As we turned and went on up the Drive, he told me more about his invention.

"I call it the Chamber of Life," he said. "It's a fantastic name, but it designates precisely what my instrument is.

"You see, it's like living another life to experience an hour or two in the Chamber. You cannot possibly realize yet just what it's like. I have created a means of reproducing all the sensations that a man would have in actual living; all the sounds, the odors, the little feelings that are half-realized in daily life--everything. The Chamber takes possession of you and lives for you. You forget your name, your very existence in this world, and you are taken bodily into a fictitious land. It is like actually living the books you would read today, or the motion pictures and plays you would watch and hear.

"It is as real as life, but it moves swiftly as a dream. You seem to pass through certain things slowly and completely, in the _tempo_ of life. Then, when the transitional moment comes, between the scenes, your sensations pass with unbelievable rapidity. The Chamber has possession of your mind. It tells you that you are doing such and such a thing, it gives you all the feeling of doing that thing, and you actually believe you are doing it. And when it snatches you away from one day and takes you into the next, it has only to make you feel that a day has passed, and it is as though you had lived through that day. You could live a lifetime in this way, in the Chamber, without spending actually more than a few hours."

* * * * *

The taxi turned a corner, leaving the Drive, and plunged into a maze of side streets. I didn't notice particularly where we were going, because I was utterly absorbed in everything Melbourne said. The city, along the upper part of the Drive, is filled with streets that twist and turn crookedly, like New York's Greenwich Village. It has always puzzled me to know how the residents ever find their way home at night--especially when they are returning from parties. I suppose they manage it somehow--perhaps by signs cut in the trees, like primitive Indians.

"Even after I had worked out the machine," Melbourne continued, "it was a year's job to put together a record for a thorough trial. That was a matter of synchronization like your talking pictures, except that everything had to be synchronized--taste touch as well as sound and vision. And thought-processes had to be included. I had this advantage, however--that I could record everything by a process of pure imagination, as I shall explain later, just as everything is received directly through the mind. And I worked out a way of going back and cutting out the extraneous impressions. Even so, it was all amazingly complicated.

"I've gotten around the difficulties of this, my first record, by avoiding a story of ordinary life. Indeed, what I have made is hardly a story at all. You can readily see how hard it would have been to use the medley of noises in traffic, or the infinite variety of subtle country-sounds. Instead, I made a story of an ideal life as I have visioned it--the future, if you like, or the life on another planet."

At this moment we turned into a dark driveway and skirted a large lawn for several hundred yards, up to Melbourne's home. It was a large house, dark at the moment, like the colonial houses you see in Virginia--the real ones, not the recent imitations that consist of little except the spotless white columns, which Jefferson adopted from the Greeks.

* * * * *

We went up some steps to a wide porch as the taxi drove away, and Melbourne unlocked the door. The hall inside was a hint of quiet, fine furnishings, with the note of simplicity that marks real taste. Melbourne himself took my hat, and put it away meticulously with his own in a cloak-room at the end of the hall. Then he led me up the stairs, deeply carpeted, to his study. I glanced around the study with interest, but I saw nothing that could, conceivably, have been what he called the Chamber of Life.

"It's not here, Mr. Barrett," he said, noticing my eagerness with a smile, "we'll go to it in a moment. I thought you might care for a highball first." From a closet he selected a bottle of Scotch, some soda, and glasses. Before he poured the whisky, he removed a small box from a cabinet, opened it, and extracted two small capsules. He dropped one of them into each glass.

"This is a harmless drug," he explained. "It will paralyze some of the nerves of your body so that you won't feel the chair you'll be sitting in nor any extraneous sensation that might interfere with the impressions you must get from the instrument. It's a sort of local anesthetic." He handed me my glass.

We drank the highballs rather hastily, and rose. Melbourne went to a door at one end of the room and opened it, switching on a light. Following him, I looked past the doorway into a small room something like the conception I had of the control-room in a submarine. It was a small chamber with metal walls. It had no windows, and only the one door through which we entered.

Around the walls were a series of cabinets with innumerable dials, switches, wires, and tiny radio tubes. It was like a glorified radio, but there were no loud speakers and no ear-phones. Two very deep and comfortable chairs stood side by side in the center of the room.

"The experience will be very simple," Melbourne said softly. "I'm not going into any detail about this instrument until we see how it works. I may as well explain, though, that the room is absolutely sound-proof, so that no trace of noises outside can enter it. Furthermore, I maintain it at an even body temperature. These precautions are to prevent interference with the sound impressions and the heat and cold stimuli of the instrument. That is the only reason we have to be confined here in this room, because it is especially adapted to the reception of these impressions.

"The instrument, you see, like a radio, is operative at a distance. I am going to test you in a moment for your wavelength. When I have that, and set the instrument, you could receive the story, so far as I know, anywhere in the world. No receiving set is necessary, for it acts directly upon the brain. But you must have these ideal conditions for pure reception."

* * * * *

I seated myself in one of the chairs, yawning a little. Melbourne, working at the dials, noticed my yawn and observed approvingly.

"That's good. The more deadened your body is to real sensations--the nearer it is to sleep--the better and more vivid will be your impressions." He pressed several buttons, and twisted a dial with sensitive fingers.

"Now, concentrate for a moment on the word _Venus_," he directed. I did so, and shortly I heard a faint humming which rose within the instrument. Then Melbourne turned a switch with a nod of satisfaction, and the humming ceased.

"That gave me your wavelength," he explained. "I have set it for my own as well--I can broadcast at one time two or more different lengths. I can broadcast more than one part in the drama, too. Whereas you, for instance, will be the man waking up in a strange world in the record we are going to receive, I have connected my wavelength to receive the emotions and the sensations of the girl, Selda."

He came forward to the other chair, and sat down.

"Everything is in readiness now," he said. "When I press this button on the arm of my chair, the lights will go out. A moment later we shall be under the stimulus of the machine. I don't think anything can happen." He smiled. "If anything does, and you are conscious enough to know it, you can call my butler by means of an electrical device I have perfected simply by speaking his name, Peter, in an ordinary conversational voice. But I don't see how anything can go wrong."

We reached for each other's hands, and shook them quietly.

"Good luck," I said. "The outcome of this means almost as much to me as it does to you." With another smile, Melbourne answered:

"Good luck to you, then, too."

At that moment the lights went off, and we sat there a few moments in total darkness....

Remembering this scene, as I bathed that morning when I came out of the lake, I began to understand more clearly what had happened to me. Evidently, then, it _had_ been last night that I saw Melbourne, and the strange other-life I had been recalling earlier had been the experience in the Chamber of Life.

But there was more yet. My mind raced back to the awakening on the hill, and to the landing in the city of Richmond. I remembered the conversation with Edvar in his apartment, the place where I had left off and gone back to my recollections of Melbourne.

Now, as I stepped out of the tub and dried myself and dressed, I returned mentally to the curious, mythical adventure in the mythical city. It was still impossible for me to feel that it was unreal, it had been so vivid, so clear.

Baret and Selda

I remember that I lived nearly two months--or so it seemed--in that other world. I was assigned an apartment near to Edvar's--Selda was between us. Edvar instructed me in the details of the life I was to lead. But he was a rather cold sort: his interests were ancient history and archeology, and he would spend his mornings at work in the Library of History or in his study, the rest of his time flying about the world on curious expeditions of discovery--examining the soil, I suppose, and investigating the customs and records of other cities.

Selda devoted most of her time to me. It was she who took me from place to place, showing me the natural beauties of that world. There were, you see, not only gentle slopes and hill-tops. There were mountainous crags as high and as wild as the Alps, forests as impenetrably deep and still as the jungles of the Amazon, and rivers that rushed and tumbled over rocks, or fell for thousands of feet from mountain cliffs.

The first time I went with her, she took me to a gigantic peak that overlooked the sea. There was, of course, a small level place for the airship to land. We left it there, and climbed on foot the last hundred yards or so. Our way lay through the heavy snow, but it was not too cold to be more than gloriously bracing, exhilarating. We wore our usual costume of trunks and tunic.

We stood at the top and looked out over the grandest horizon I had ever seen. To the east there lay the sea, deep and very blue in the sunlight. The shore was just a dark line far away and below us. There was a long strip of grass and field bordering the sea for miles, and behind that the forest. Toward the north, the mountains crept out from under the forest and moved down to the sea, rising until they became a vast wilderness of cliffs and rocks, and hid the sea, with peak after peak rising as far as the eye could reach into the snow and the mist. Then the hills sloped down westward into a series of wooded valleys, through which ran the wide river I had seen at my awakening, coming down from the mountains and through the valleys until it flattened broadly out into the low plains in the south and moved eastward to the sea. Everywhere in the valleys and over the plains, I knew that cities were scattered, lonely and tall like the one they called Richmond. But we were so high in the mountains that they were invisible to us--perhaps a keen eye could have found them, tiny white dots crouching upon the earth.

I turned to Selda--and caught my breath. The wind, swooping up from the sea, whipped her thin covering against her body and fluttered it like the swift wings of a butterfly behind her. Her short, dark hair, too, was lifted and blown back from her forehead, revealing the clean, soft profile of her face. I had never seen a girl who stood so clean, so straight. I watched her until she turned, too, and met my eyes. In them I thought I detected something startled and unfathomable.

"My God!" I cried across the wind, "you are beautiful!" She frowned a little, but her eyes still looked searchingly into mine. I stepped forward, facing her. But I didn't touch her. I was afraid to touch anything so clean.

"You belong here, Selda," I added. "The wind is a part of you, and the mountains, and the sea. You shouldn't have to live in the midst of all those people in the city. You belong here." She smiled faintly, looking up at me.

"You belong here more than I do, Baret," she said. "You came to us, not from the city, but from the hills."

* * * * *

We stood there, examining each other's eyes, for a long while. I wanted to take her in my arms, but I didn't. I looked away at last, back at the sea, puzzled and disturbed. I had never been aware of anything so fine as this before, nor of anything so painful. Suddenly I found myself wanting to be something, to do something--not for myself, but for her. It was strange.

"Come," she said at last, "we had better go back."

"I'd like to stay here forever," I answered moodily, glancing around a last time at the versatile horizon.