City of Endless Night by Milo Hastings (e novels to read online .TXT) 📕

took me by the arm and led me forth and conducted me to my own apartment on the chemical level. Arriving there he pushed me gently into a chair and stepped toward the switch of the telephone.

"Just a minute," I said, "I remember now. I was not on my level--that was not my book store."

"The card orders me to call up the hospital," said the guard.

"It is unnecessary," I said. "Do not call them."

The guard gazed first at me and then at the card. "It is signed by a Lieutenant and you are a Captain--" his brows knitted as he wrestled with the problem--"I do not know what to do. Does a Captain with an affected memory outrank a Lieutenant?"

"He does," I solemnly assured him.

Still a little puzzled, he returned the card, saluted and was gone. It had been a narrow escape. I got out my atlas and read again the rules that set forth my right to be at large in the city. Clearly I had a right to be found in the medical level--but in trying to buy a book there I had evidently erred most seriously. So I carefully memorized the list of shops set down in my identification folder and on my cards.

For the next few days I lived alone in my apartment unmolested except by an occasional visit from Holknecht, the laboratory assistant, who knew nothing but chemistry, talked nothing but chemistry, and seemed dead to all human emotions and human curiosity. Applying myself diligently to the study of Armstadt's books and notes, I was delighted to find that the Germans, despite their great chemical progress, were ignorant of many things I knew. I saw that my knowledge discreetly used, might enable me to become a great man among them and so learn secrets that would be of immense value to the outer world, should I later contrive to escape from Berlin.

By my discoveries of the German workings in the potash mines I had indeed opened a new road to Berlin. It was up to me by further discoveries to open a road out again, not only for my own escape, but perhaps also to find a way by which the World Armies might enter Berlin as the Greeks entered Troy. Vague ambitious dreams were these that filled and thrilled me, for I was young in years, and the romantic spirit of heroic adventure surged in my blood.

These days of study were quite uneventful, except for a single illuminating incident; a further example of the super-efficiency of the Germans. I found the meals served me at my apartment rather less in quantity than my appetite craved. While there was a reasonable variety, the nutritive value was always the same to a point of scientific exactness, and I had seen no shops where extra food was available. After I had been in my apartment about a week, some one rang at the door. I opened it and a man called out the single word, "Weigher." Just behind him stood a platform scale on small wheels and with handles like a go-cart. The weigher stood, notebook in hand, waiting for me to act. I took the hint and stepped upon the scales. He read the weight and as he recorded it, remarked:

"Three kilograms over."

Without further explanation he pushed the scales toward the next door. The following day I noticed that the portions of food served me were a trifle smaller than they had been previously. The original Karl Armstadt had evidently been of such build that he carried slightly less weight than I, which fact now condemned me to this light diet.

However, I reasoned that a light diet is conducive to good brain work, and as I later learned, the object of this systematic weight control was not alone to save food but to increase mental efficiency, for a fat man is phlegmatic and a lean one too excitable for the best mental output. It would also help my disguise by keeping me the exact weight and build of the original Karl Armstadt.

After a fortnight of study, I felt that I was now ready to take up my work in the laboratory, but I feared my lack of general knowledge of the city and its ways might still betray me. Hence I began further journeyings about the streets and shops of those levels where a man of my class was permitted to go.

~4~

After exhausting the rather barren sport of walking about the monotonous streets of the four professional levels I took a more exciting trip down into the lower levels of the city where the vast mechanical industries held sway. I did not know how much freedom might be allowed me, but I reasoned that I would be out of my supposed normal environment and hence my ignorance would be more excusable and in less danger of betraying me.

Alighting from the elevator, I hurried along past endless rows of heavy columns. I peered into the workrooms, which had no enclosing walls, and discovered with some misgiving that I seemed to have come upon a race of giants. The men at the machines were great hulking fellows with thick, heavy muscles such as one would expect to see in a professional wrestler or weight-lifter. I paused and tried to gauge the size of these men: I decided that they were not giants for I had seen taller men in the outer world. Two officials of some sort, distinguishable by finer garb, walking among them, appeared to be men of average size, and the tops of their heads came about to the workers' chins. That there should be such men among the Germans was not unbelievable, but the strange thing was that there should be so many of them, and that they should be so uniformly large, for there was not a workman in the whole vast factory floor that did not over-top the officials by at least half a head.

"Of course," I reasoned, "this is part of German efficiency";--for the men were feeding large plates through stamping mills--"they have selected all the large men for this heavy work." Then as I continued to gaze it occurred to me that this bright metal these Samsons were handling was aluminum!

I went on and came to a different work hall where men were tending wire winding machinery, making the coils for some light electrical instruments. It was work that girls could easily have done, yet these men were nearly, if not quite, as hulking as their mates in the stamping mill. To select such men for light-fingered work was not efficiency but stupidity,--and then it came to me that I had also thought the soldiers I had seen in the hospital to be men picked for size, and that in a normal population there could not be such an abundance of men of abnormal size. The meaning of it all began to clear in my mind--the pedigree in my own identification folder with the numerous fraternity, the system of social castes which my atlas had revealed, the inexplicable and unnatural proportion of the sexes. These gigantic men were not the mere pick from individual variation in the species, but a distinct breed within a race wherein the laws of nature, that had kept men of equal stature for countless centuries, even as wild animals were equal, had been replaced by the laws of scientific breeding. These heavy and ponderous labourers were the Percherons and Clydesdales of a domesticated and scientifically bred human species. The soldiers, somewhat less bulky and more active, were, no doubt, another distinct breed. The professional classes which had seemed quite normal in physical appearance--were they bred for mental rather than physical qualities? Otherwise why the pedigree, why the rigid castes, the isolation of women? I shuddered as the whole logical, inevitable explanation unfolded. It was uncanny, unearthly, yet perfectly scientific; a thing the world had speculated about for centuries, a thing that every school boy knew could be done, and yet which I, facing the fact that it had been done, could only believe by a strained effort at scientific coolness.

I walked on and on, absorbed, overwhelmed by these assaulting, unbelievable conclusions, yet on either side as I walked was the ever present evidence of the reality of these seemingly wild fancies. There were miles upon miles of these endless workrooms and everywhere the same gross breed of great blond beasts.

The endless shops of Berlin's industrial level were very like those elsewhere in the world, except that they were more vast, more concentrated, and the work more speeded up by super-machines and excessive specialization. Millions upon millions of huge, drab-clad, stolid-faced workmen stood at their posts of duty, performing over and over again their routine movements as the material of their labors shuttled by in endless streams.

Occasionally among the workmen I saw the uniforms of the petty officers who acted as foremen, and still more rarely the administrative offices, where, enclosed in glass panelled rooms, higher officials in more bespangled uniforms poured over charts and plans.

In all this colossal business there was everywhere the atmosphere of perfect order, perfect system, perfect discipline. Go as I might among the electrical works, among the vast factories of chemicals and goods, the lighter labor of the textile mills, or the heavier, noisier business of the mineral works and machine shops the same system of colossal coordinate mechanism of production throbbed ceaselessly. Materials flowed in endless streams, feeding electric furnaces, mills, machines; passing out to packing tables and thence to vast store rooms. Industry here seemed endless and perfect. The bovine humanity fitted to the machinery as the ox to the treadmill. Everywhere was the ceaseless throbbing of the machine. Of the human variation and the free action of man in labour, there was no evidence, and no opportunity for its existence.

Turning from the mere monotonous endlessness of the workshops I made my way to the levels above where the workers lived in those hours when they ceased to be a part of the industrial mechanism of production; and everywhere were drab-coloured men for these shifts of labour were arranged so that no space at any time was wholly idle. I now passed by miles of sleeping dormitories, and other miles of gymnasiums, picture theatres and gaming tables, and, strikingly incongruous with the atmosphere of the place, huge assembly rooms which were labelled "Free Speech Halls." I started to enter one of these, where some kind of a meeting was in progress, but I was thrust back by a great fellow who grinned foolishly and said: "Pardon, Herr Captain, it is forbidden you."

Through half-darkened streets, I again passed by the bunk-shelved sleeping chambers with their cavernous aisles walled with orderly rows of lockers. Again I came to other barracks where the men were not yet asleep but were straggling in and sitting about on the lowest bunks of these sterile makeshift homes.

I then came into a district of mess halls where a meal was being served. Here again was absolute economy and perfect system. The men dined at endless tables and their food like the material for their labours, was served to the workers by the highly efficient device of an endless moving belt that rolled up out of a slot in the floor at the end of the table after the manner of the chained steps of an escalator.

From the moving belts the men took their portions, and, as they finished eating, they cleared away by setting the empty dishes back upon the moving belt. The sight fascinated me, because of the adaptation of this mechanical principle to so strange a use, for the principle is old and, as every engineer knows, was instrumental in founding the house of Detroit Vehicle Kings that once dominated the industrial world. The founder of that illustrious line gave the poorest citizen a motor car and disrupted the wage system of his day by paying his men double the standard wage, yet he failed to realize the full possibilities of efficiency for he permitted his men to eat at round tables and be served by women! Truly we of the free world very narrowly escaped the fetish of efficiency which finally completely enslaved the Germans.

Each of the long tables of this Berlin dining hall, the ends of which faced me, was fenced off from its neighbours. At the entrance gates were signs which read "2600 Calories," "2800 Calories," "3000 Calories"--I followed down the line to the sign which read "Maximum Diet, 4000 Calories." The next one read, "Minimum Diet 2000 Calories," and thence the series was repeated. Farther on I saw that men were assembling before such gates in lines, for the meal there had not begun. Moving to the other side of the street I walked by the lines which curved out and swung down the street. Those before the sign of "Minimum Diet" were not quite so tall as the average, although obviously of the