I GO PLEASURING ON THE LEVEL OF FREE WOMEN AND DRINK SYNTHETIC BEER
~1~
I had returned from my adventure on the labour levels in a mood of
sombre depression. Alone again in my apartment I found difficulty in
getting my mind back upon chemical books. With a sense of relief I
reported to Holknecht that I thought myself sufficiently recovered to
return to work.
My laboratory I found to be almost as secluded as my living quarters. I
was master there, and as a research worker I reported to no man until I
had finished the problem assigned me. From my readings and from
Holknecht's endless talking I had fairly well grasped the problem on
which I was supposed to be working, and I now had Holknecht go carefully
over the work he had done in my absence and we prepared a report. This I
sent to headquarters with a request for permission to start work on
another problem, the idea for which I claimed to have conceived on my
visit to the attacked potash mines.
Permission to undertake the new problem was promptly granted. I now set
to work to reproduce in a German laboratory the experiments by which I
had originally conquered the German gas that had successfully defended
those mines from the world for over a century. Though loath to make this
revelation, I knew of no other "Discovery" wherewith to gain the stakes
for which I was playing.
Events shaped themselves most rapidly along the lines of my best hopes.
The new research proved a blanket behind which to hide my ignorance. We
needed new material, new apparatus, and new data and I encouraged
Holknecht to advise me as to where to obtain these things and so gained
requisite working knowledge.
The experiments and demonstrations finished, I made my report. My
immediate superior evidently quickly recognized it as a matter too
important for his consideration and dutifully passed it up to his own
superiors. In a few days I was notified to prepare for a demonstration
before a committee of the Imperial Chemical Staff.
They came to my small laboratory with much eager curiosity. From their
manner of making themselves known to me I realized with joy that they
were dealing with a stranger. Indeed it was improbable that it should
have been otherwise for there were upwards of fifty thousand chemists of
my rank in Berlin.
The demonstration went off with a flourish and the committee were
greatly impressed. Means were at once taken to alter the gas with which
the Stassfurt mines were flooded, but I realized that meant nothing
since I believed that my companions had abandoned the enterprise and the
secret that had enabled me to invade mines had not been shared with any
one in the outer world.
As I anticipated, my revelation was accepted by the Chemical Staff as
evidence of profound scientific genius. It followed as a logical matter
that I should be promoted to the highest rank of research chemists with
the title of Colonel. Because of my youth the more was made of the
honour. This promotion entitled me to double my previous salary, to a
larger laboratory and larger and better living quarters in a distant
part of the city.
My assistant would now be of the rank I had previously been and as
Holknecht was not eligible to such promotion I was removed entirely from
all previous acquaintances and surroundings and so greatly decreased the
chance of discovery of my true identity.
~2~
After I had removed to my new quarters I was requested to call at the
office of the Chemical Staff to discuss the line of research I should
next take up. My adviser in this matter was the venerable Herr von Uhl,
a white haired old patriarch whose jacket was a mass of decorations. The
insignia on the left breast indicating the achievements in chemical
science were already familiar to me, but those on the right breast
were strange.
Perhaps I stared at them a little, for the old man, noting my interest,
remarked proudly, "Yes, I have contributed much glory to the race and
our group,--one hundred and forty-seven children,--one hundred and four
of them sons, fifty-eight already of a captain's rank, and twenty-nine
of them colonels--my children of the second and third generation number
above two thousand. Only three men living in Berlin have more total
descendants--and I am but seventy-eight years of age. If I live to be
ninety I shall break all records of the Eugenic Office. It all comes of
good breeding and good work. I won my paternity right, when I was but
twenty-eight, just about your age. If you pass the physical test,
perhaps you can duplicate my record. For this early promotion you have
won qualifies you mentally."
Astonished and alarmed beyond measure I could find no reply and sat
staring dumbly, while Herr von Uhl, beginning to speak of chemical
matters, inquired if I had any preference as to the problem I should now
take up. Incapable of any clear thinking I could only ask if he had any
to suggest.
Immediately the old man's face brightened. "A man of your genius," he
said, "should be permitted to try his brain with the greatest problems
on which the life of Germany depends. The Staff discussed this and has
assigned you to original research for the finding of a better method of
the extraction of protium from the ore. To work on this assignment you
must of necessity share grave secrets, which, should they be disclosed,
might create profound fears, but your professional honour is a sufficient
guarantee of secrecy. In this research you will compete with some of the
most distinguished chemists in Berlin. If you should be successful you
will be decorated by His Majesty and you will receive a liberal pension
commensurate with the value of your discovery."
I was profoundly impressed. Evidently I had stumbled upon something of
vital importance, the real nature of which I did not in the least
comprehend, and happily was not supposed to. The interview was ended by
my being entrusted with voluminous unpublished documents which I was
told to take home and study. Two armed men were ordered to accompany me
and to stand alternate guard outside my apartment while I had the
documents in my possession.
~3~
In the quiet of my new abode I unsealed the package. The first sheet
contained the official offer of the rewards in store for success with
the research. The further papers explained the occasion for the gravity
and secrecy, and outlined the problem.
The colossal consequence of the matter with which I was dealing gripped
and thrilled me. Protium, it seemed, was the German name for a rare
element of the radium group, which, from its atomic weight and other
properties, I recognized as being known to the outside world only as a
laboratory curiosity of no industrial significance.
But, as used by the Germans, this element was the essence of life
itself, for by the influence of its emanations, they had achieved the
synthesis of protein capable of completely nourishing the human body--a
thing that could be accomplished in the outside world only through the
aid of natural protein derived from plants and animals.
How I wished, as I read, that my uncle could have shared with me this
revelation of a secret that he had spent his life in a fruitless effort
to unravel. We had long since discovered how the Germans had synthesized
the carbohydrate molecule from carbon dioxide and water and built
therefrom the sugars, starches and fat needed for human nutrition. We
knew quite as well how they had created the simpler nitrogen compounds,
that this last step of synthesizing complete food proteins--a step
absolutely essential to the support of human life wholly from synthetic
foods--the chemists of the outer world had never mastered.
But no less interesting than the mere chemistry of all this was the
history of it all, and the light it threw on the larger story of how
Germany had survived when the scientists of the world had predicted her
speedy annihiliation. The original use of protium had, I found, been
discovered late in the Twentieth Century when the protium ores of the
Ural Mountains were still available to the German chemists. After Russia
had been won by the World Armies, the Germans for a time suffered
chronic nitrogen starvation, as they depended on the protium derived
from what remained of their agriculture and from the fisheries in the
Baltic. As the increasing bombardment from the air herded them within
their fast building armoured city, and drove them beneath the soil in
all other German territory and from the surface of the sea in the
Baltic; they must have perished miserably but for the discovery of a new
source of protium.
This source they had found in the uninhabited islands of the Arctic,
where the formation of the Ural Mountains extends beneath the sea.
Sending their submarines thence in search of platinum ores they had not
found platinum but a limited supply of ore containing the even more
valuable protium. By this traffic Germany had survived for a century and
a half. The quantity of the rare element needed was small, for its
effect, like that of radium, was out of all proportion to its bulk. But
this little they must have, and it seems that the supply of ore
was failing.
Nor was that all to interest me. How did the German submarine get to the
Arctic since the World State had succeeded, after half a century of
effort, in damming the Baltic by closing up several passes among the
Danish Islands and the main pass of the sound between Zealand and
Sweden? I remember, as a youngster, the great Jubilee that celebrated
the completion of that monumental task, and the joy that hailed from the
announcement that the world's shipping would at last be freed from an
ancient scourge.
But little had we of the world known the magnitude of the German fears
as the Baltic dam neared completion. We had thought merely to protect
our commerce from German piracy and perhaps to stop them from getting a
little copper and rubber in some remote corner of the earth. But we did
not realize that we were about to cut them off from an essential element
without which that conceited and defiant race must have speedily run up
the white flag of absolute surrender or have died to the last man, like
rats in a neglected trap.
But the completion of the Baltic dam evidently had not shut off the
supply of Arctic ore, for the annual importation of ore was given right
up to date though the Baltic had been closed for nearly a score of
years. Eagerly I searched my papers for an item that would give some
hint as to how the submarines got out of the dammed-up Baltic. But on
that point the documents before me were silent. They referred to the
Arctic ore, gave elaborate details as to mineralogy and geology of the
strata from which it came, but as to the ways of its coming into Berlin
there was not the slightest suggestion. That this ore must come by
submarine was obvious. If so, the submarine must be at large in the
Atlantic and Arctic seas, and those occasional reports of periscopes
sighted off the coast of Norway, which have never been credited, were
really true. The submarines, or at least their cargoes, must reach
Berlin by some secret passage. Here indeed was a master mystery, a
secret which, could I unravel it and escape to the outer world with the
knowledge, would put unconditionally within the power of the World State
the very life of the three hundred millions of this unholy race that was
bred and fed by science in the armoured City of Berlin, or that, working
like blind moles of the earth, held the world at bay from off the
sterile and pock-marked soil of all that was left of the one-time
German Empire.
That night I did not sleep till near the waking hour, and when the
breakfast container bumped into the receiving cupboard I was nodding
over the chemical papers amid strange and wonderful dreams.
~4~
Next day with three assistants, themselves chemists of no mean rank, I
set to work to prepare apparatus for repeating all the known processes
in the extraction and use of the rare and vital element. This work
absorbed me for many weeks, during which time I went nowhere and saw no
one and slept scarce one hour out of four.
But the steady application told upon me, and, by way of recreation, I
decided to spend an evening on the Level of Free Women, a place to
which, much though it fascinated me, I had not yet mustered the
courage to go.
My impression, as I stepped from the elevator, was much as that of a man
who alights from a train in a strange city on a carnival night. Before
me, instead of the narrow, quiet streets of the working and living
quarters of the city, there spread a broad and seemingly endless hall of
revelry, broken only by the massive grey pillars that held up the
multi-floored city. The place was thronged with men of varied ranks and
professions. But more numerous and conspicuous were the women, the first
and only women that I had seen among the Germans--the Free Women of
Berlin, dressed in gorgeous and daring costumes; women of whom but few
were beautiful, yet in whose tinted cheeks and sparkling eyes was all
the lure of parasitic love.
The multi-hued apparel of the throng dazzled and astonished me.
Elsewhere I had found a sterile monotony of dress and even of stature
and features. But here was resplendent variety and display. Men from all
the professional and military classes mingled indiscriminately, their
divers uniforms and decorations suggesting a dress ball in the capital
of the world. But the motley costumes of the women, who dressed with the
license of unrestrained individuality, were even more startling and
bizarre--a kaleidoscopic fantastic masquerade.
I wondered if the rule of convention and tyranny of style had lost all
hold upon these women. And yet I decided, as I watched more closely,
that there was not an absence of style but rather a warfare of styles.
The costumes varied from the veiled and beruffled displays, that left
one confounded as to what manner of creature dwelt therein, to the other
extreme of mere gaudily ornamented nudity. I smiled as I recalled the
world-old argument on the relative modesty of much or little clothing,
for here immodesty was competing side by side in both extremes, both
seemingly equally successful.
But it was not alone in the matter of dress that the women of the Free
Level varied. They differed even more strikingly in form and feature,
for, as I was later more fully to comprehend, these women were drawn
from all the artificially specialized breeds into which German science
had wrought the human species. Most striking and most numerous were
those whom I rightly guessed to be of the labour strain. Proportionally
not quite so large as the males of the breed, yet they were huge,
full-formed, fleshly creatures, with milky white skin for the most part
crudely painted with splashes of vermilion and with blued or blackened
brows. The garishness of their dress and ornament clearly bespoke the
poorer quality of their intellect, yet to my disgust they seemed fully
as popular with the men as the smaller and more refined types, evidently
from the intellectual strains of the race.
Happily these ungainly women of the labour strain were inclined to herd
by themselves and I hastened to direct my steps to avoid as much as
possible their overwhelming presence.
The smaller women, who seemed to be more nearly human, were even more
variegated in their features and make-up. They were not all blondes,
for some of them were distinctively dark of hair and skin, though
I was puzzled to tell how much of this was inborn and how much
the work of art. Another thing that astonished me was the wide
range of bodily form, as evidently determined by nutrition. Clearly
there was no weight-control here, for the figures varied from extreme
slenderness to waddling fatness. The most common type was that of mild
obesity which men call "plumpness," a quality so prized since the world
began that the women of all races by natural selection become relatively
fatter than men.
For the most part I found these women unattractive and even repellent,
and yet as I walked about the level I occasionally caught fleeting
glimpses of genuine beauty of face and form, and more rarely expressions
of a seeming high order of intelligence.
This revelling multitude of men and girls was uproariously engaged in
the obvious business of enjoying themselves by means of every art known
to appeal to the mind of man--when intelligence is abandoned and moral
restraint thrown to the winds.
I wended my way among the multitude, gay with colour, noisy with chatter
and mingled music, redolent with a hundred varieties of sensuous
perfume. I came upon a dancing floor. Whirling and twisting about the
columns, circling around a gorgeous scented and iridescent fountain,
officers and scientists, chemists and physicians, each clasping in his
arms a laughing girl, danced with abandon to languorous music.
As I watched the dance I overheard two girls commenting upon the
appearance of the dancers. Whirling by in the arms of a be-medalled
officer, was a girl whose frizzled yellow hair fell about a
dun-brown face.
"Did you see that, Fedora, tanned as a roof guard and with that hair!"
"Well, you know," said the other, "it's becoming quite the fashion
again."
"Why don't you try it? Three baths would tan you adorably and you do
have the proper hair."
"Oh, yes, I have the hair, all right, but my skin won't stand it. I
tried it three years ago and I blistered outrageously."
The talk drifted to less informing topics and I moved on and came to
other groups lounging at their ease on rugs and divans as they watched
more skilful girls squirming through some intricate ballet on an
exhibition platform.
Seeing me stand apart, a milk-white girl with hair dyed pink came
tugging at my arm. Her opalescent eyes looked from out her chalky
countenance; but they were not hard eyes, indeed they seemed the eyes of
innocence. As I shook my head and rebuffed her cordial advance I felt,
not that I was refusing the proffered love of a painted woman, but
rather that I was meanly declining a child's invitation to join her
play. In haste I edged away and wandered on past endless gaming tables
where men in feverish eagerness whirled wheels of chance, while garishly
dressed girls leaned on their shoulders and hung about their necks.
Announced by shouts and shrieking laughter I came upon a noisy jumble of
mechanical amusement devices where men and girls in whirling upholstered
boxes were being pitched and tumbled about.
Beyond the noise of the childish whirligigs I came into a space where
the white ceiling lights were dimmed by crimson globes and picture
screens were in operation. It did not take long for me to grasp the
essential difference between these pictured stories and those I had seen
in the workmen's level. There love of woman was entirely absent from the
screen. Here it was the sole substance of the pictures. But unlike the
love romances of the outer world, there were no engagement rings, no
wedding bells, and never once did the face or form of a child appear.
In seating myself to see the pictures I had carefully chosen a place
where there was only room for myself between a man and one of the
supporting columns. At an interlude the man arose to go. The girl who
had been with him arose also, but he pushed her back upon the bench,
saying that he had other engagements, and did not wish her company. The
moment he was gone the girl moved over and proceeded to crowd
caressingly against my shoulder. She was a huge girl, obviously of the
labour strain. She leaned over me as if I had been a lonely child and
she a lonelier woman. Crowded against the pillar I could not escape and
so tried to appear unconcerned.
"Did you like that story?" I asked, referring to the picture that had
just ended.
"No," she replied, "the girl was too timid. She could never have won a
roof guard captain in that fashion. They are very difficult men, those
roof guard officers."
"And what kind of pictures do you prefer?" I asked.
"Quartettes," she answered promptly. "Two men and two girls when both
girls want the other man, and both men want the girl they have. That
makes a jolly plot. Or else the ones where there are two perfect lovers
and the man is elected to paternity and leaves her. I had a man like
that once and it makes me sad to see such a picture."
"Perhaps," I said, speaking in a timorous voice, "you wanted to go with
him and be the mother of his children?"
She turned her face toward me in the dim light. "He talked like that,"
she said, "and then, I hated him. I knew then that he wanted to go and
leave me. That he hadn't tried to avoid the paternity draft. Yes, he
wanted to sire children. And he knew that he would have to leave me. And
so I hated him for ever loving me."
A strange thrill crept over me at the girl's words. I tried to fathom
her nature, to separate the tangle of reality from the artificial ideas
ingrained by deliberate mis-education. "Did you ever see children? Here,
I mean. Pictures of them, perhaps, on the screen?"
"Never," said the girl, drawing away from me and straightening up till
my head scarce reached her shoulder. "And I never want to. I hate the
thought of them. I wish I never had been one. Why can't
we--forget them?"
I did not answer, and the labour girl, who, for some technical flaw in
her physique had been rejected for motherhood, arose and walked
ponderously away.
After this baffling revelation of the struggle of human souls caught in
the maw of machine-made science, I found the picture screen a dull dead
thing, and I left the hall and wandered for miles, it seemed, past
endless confusion of meaningless revelry. Everywhere was music and
gaming and laughter. Men and girls lounged and danced, or spun the
wheels of fortune or sat at tables drinking from massive steins, a
highly flavoured variety of rather ineffectual synthetic beer. Older
women served and waited on the men and girls, and for every man was at
least one girl and sometimes as many as could crowd about him. And so
they sang, and banged their mugs and sloshed their frothy beverage.
A lonely stranger amidst the jostling throngs, I wandered on through the
carnival of Berlin's Level of Free Women. Despite my longing for human
companionship I found it difficult to join in this strange recrudescent
paganism with any ease or grace.
Girls, alone or in groups, fluttered about me with many a covert or open
invitation to join in their merry-making, but something in my halting
manner and constrained speech seemed to repulse them, for they would
soon turn away as if condemning me as a man without appreciation of the
value of human enjoyment.
My constraint and embarrassment were increased by a certain sense of
guilt, a feeling which no one in this vast throng, either man or woman,
seemed to share. The place had its own standard of ethics, and they were
shocking enough to a man nurtured in a human society founded on the
sanctification of monogamous marriage. But merely to condemn this
recreational life of Germany, by likening it to the licentious freedom
that exists in occasional unrestrained amusement places in the outer
world, would be to give a very incorrect interpretation of Berlin's
Level of Free Women. As we know such places elsewhere in the world there
is always about them some tacit confession of moral delinquency, some
pretence of apology on the part of the participants. The women who so
revel in the outer world consider themselves under a ban of social
disapproval, while the men are either of a type who have no sense of
moral restraint or men who have for the time abandoned it.
But for this life in Berlin no guilt was felt, no apology offered. The
men considered it as quite a normal and proper part of their life, while
the women looked upon it as their whole life, to which they had been
trained and educated and set apart by the Government; they accepted the
rôle quite as did the scientist, labourer, soldier, or professional
mother. The state had decreed it to be. They did not question its
morality. Hence the life here was licentious and yet unashamed, much, as
I fancy was the life in the groves of Athens or the baths of
ancient Rome.