"Did what?"
"Made real a dream." The voice turned angry. "Fools! I bring it here to
sell to Westman, the camera people, and what do they say? 'It isn't
clear. Only one person can use it at a time. It's too expensive.' Fools!
Fools!"
"Huh?"
"Listen! I'm Albert Ludwig--_Professor_ Ludwig." As Dan was silent, he
continued, "It means nothing to you, eh? But listen--a movie that gives
one sight and sound. Suppose now I add taste, smell, even touch, if your
interest is taken by the story. Suppose I make it so that you are in the
story, you speak to the shadows, and the shadows reply, and instead of
being on a screen, the story is all about you, and you are in it. Would
that be to make real a dream?"
"How the devil could you do that?"
"How? How? But simply! First my liquid positive, then my magic
spectacles. I photograph the story in a liquid with light-sensitive
chromates. I build up a complex solution--do you see? I add taste
chemically and sound electrically. And when the story is recorded, then
I put the solution in my spectacle--my movie projector. I electrolyze
the solution, break it down; the older chromates go first, and out comes
the story, sight, sound, smell, taste--all!"
"Touch?"
"If your interest is taken, your mind supplies that." Eagerness crept
into his voice. "You will look at it, Mr.----?"
"Burke," said Dan. "A swindle!" he thought. Then a spark of recklessness
glowed out of the vanishing fumes of alcohol. "Why not?" he grunted.
He rose; Ludwig, standing, came scarcely to his shoulder. A queer
gnomelike old man, Dan thought as he followed him across the park and
into one of the scores of apartment hotels in the vicinity.
In his room Ludwig fumbled in a bag, producing a device vaguely
reminiscent of a gas mask. There were goggles and a rubber mouthpiece;
Dan examined it curiously, while the little bearded professor brandished
a bottle of watery liquid.
"Here it is!" he gloated. "My liquid positive, the story. Hard
photography--infernally hard, therefore the simplest story. A
Utopia--just two characters and you, the audience. Now, put the
spectacles on. Put them on and tell me what fools the Westman people
are!" He decanted some of the liquid into the mask, and trailed a
twisted wire to a device on the table. "A rectifier," he explained. "For
the electrolysis."
"Must you use all the liquid?" asked Dan. "If you use part, do you see
only part of the story? And which part?"
"Every drop has all of it, but you must fill the eye-pieces." Then as
Dan slipped the device gingerly on, "So! Now what do you see?"
"Not a damn' thing. Just the windows and the lights across the street."
"Of course. But now I start the electrolysis. Now!"
* * * * *
There was a moment of chaos. The liquid before Dan's eyes clouded
suddenly white, and formless sounds buzzed. He moved to tear the device
from his head, but emerging forms in the mistiness caught his interest.
Giant things were writhing there.
The scene steadied; the whiteness was dissipating like mist in summer.
Unbelieving, still gripping the arms of that unseen chair, he was
staring at a forest. But what a forest! Incredible, unearthly,
beautiful! Smooth boles ascended inconceivably toward a brightening sky,
trees bizarre as the forests of the Carboniferous age. Infinitely
overhead swayed misty fronds, and the verdure showed brown and green in
the heights. And there were birds--at least, curiously lovely pipings
and twitterings were all about him though he saw no creatures--thin
elfin whistlings like fairy bugles sounded softly.
He sat frozen, entranced. A louder fragment of melody drifted down to
him, mounting in exquisite, ecstatic bursts, now clear as sounding
metal, now soft as remembered music. For a moment he forgot the chair
whose arms he gripped, the miserable hotel room invisibly about him, old
Ludwig, his aching head. He imagined himself alone in the midst of that
lovely glade. "Eden!" he muttered, and the swelling music of unseen
voices answered.
Some measure of reason returned. "Illusion!" he told himself. Clever
optical devices, not reality. He groped for the chair's arm, found it,
and clung to it; he scraped his feet and found again an inconsistency.
To his eyes the ground was mossy verdure; to his touch it was merely a
thin hotel carpet.
The elfin buglings sounded gently. A faint, deliciously sweet perfume
breathed against him; he glanced up to watch the opening of a great
crimson blossom on the nearest tree, and a tiny reddish sun edged into
the circle of sky above him. The fairy orchestra swelled louder in its
light, and the notes sent a thrill of wistfulness through him. Illusion?
If it were, it made reality almost unbearable; he wanted to believe that
somewhere--somewhere this side of dreams, there actually existed this
region of loveliness. An outpost of Paradise? Perhaps.
And then--far through the softening mists, he caught a movement that was
not the swaying of verdure, a shimmer of silver more solid than mist.
Something approached. He watched the figure as it moved, now visible,
now hidden by trees; very soon he perceived that it was human, but it
was almost upon him before he realized that it was a girl.
She wore a robe of silvery, half-translucent stuff, luminous as
starbeams; a thin band of silver bound glowing black hair about her
forehead, and other garment or ornament she had none. Her tiny white
feet were bare to the mossy forest floor as she stood no more than a
pace from him, staring dark-eyed. The thin music sounded again; she
smiled.
Dan summoned stumbling thoughts. Was this being also--illusion? Had she
no more reality than the loveliness of the forest? He opened his lips to
speak, but a strained excited voice sounded in his ears. "Who are you?"
Had he spoken? The voice had come as if from another, like the sound of
one's words in fever.
The girl smiled again. "English!" she said in queer soft tones. "I can
speak a little English." She spoke slowly, carefully. "I learned it
from"--she hesitated--"my mother's father, whom they call the Grey
Weaver."