The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster (phonics reading books .TXT) 📕
Inside, her anxiety increased. The arrangements were old-fashioned and rough. There was even a female attendant, to whom she would have to announce her wants during the voyage. Of course a revolving platform ran the length of the boat, but she was expected to walk from it to her cabin. Some cabins were better than others, and she did not get the best. She thought the attendant had been unfair, and spasms of rage shook her. The glass valves had closed, she could not go back. She saw, at the end of the vestibule, the lift in which she had ascended going quietly up and down, empty. Beneath those corridors of shining tiles were rooms, tier below tier, reaching far into the earth, and in each room there sat a human being, eating, or sleeping, or producing ideas. And buried deep in the hive was her own room. Vashti was afraid.
"O Machine!" she murmured, and caressed her Book, and was comforted.
Then the sides of the vestibule seemed to melt together, as do the passages that we see in dreams, the l
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“Where are you?” she sobbed.
His voice in the darkness said, “Here.”
Is there any hope, Kuno?”
“None for us.”
“Where are you?”
She crawled over the bodies of the dead. His blood spurted over her hands.
“Quicker,” he gasped, “I am dying—but we touch, we talk, not through the Machine.”
He kissed her.
“We have come back to our own. We die, but we have recaptured life, as it was in Wessex, when �lfrid overthrew the Danes. We know what they know outside, they who dwelt in the cloud that is the colour of a pearl.”
“But Kuno, is it true ? Are there still men on the surface of the earth ? Is this—tunnel, this poisoned darkness—really not the end?”
He replied:
“I have seen them, spoken to them, loved them. They are hiding in the midst and the ferns until our civilization stops. Today they are the Homeless—tomorrow —”
“Oh, tomorrow—some fool will start the Machine again, tomorrow.”
“Never,” said Kuno, “never. Humanity has learnt its lesson.”
As he spoke, the whole city was broken like a honeycomb. An air-ship had sailed in through the vomitory into a ruined wharf. It crashed downwards, exploding as it went, rending gallery after gallery with its wings of steel. For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky.
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