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+Project Gutenberg's The Chamber of Life, by Green Peyton Wertenbaker
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Chamber of Life
+
+Author: Green Peyton Wertenbaker
+
+Illustrator: Austin Briggs
+
+Release Date: June 21, 2008 [EBook #25862]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHAMBER OF LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Annie McGuire and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
++-------------------------------------------------------+
+|This etext was produced from Amazing Stories July 1962,|
+|a reprint from Amazing Stories October 1929. Extensive |
+|research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.    |
+|copyright on this publication was renewed.             |
++-------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+  A Classic Reprint from AMAZING STORIES, October, 1929
+
+  Illustrated by BRIGGS
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+  The CHAMBER of LIFE
+
+  By G. PEYTON WERTENBAKER
+
+  _Copyright 1929 by E. P. Inc._
+
+
+
+
+A Strange Awakening
+
+
+My first sensation was one of sudden and intense cold--a chill that shot
+through my body and engulfed it like a charge of electricity. For a
+moment I was conscious of nothing else. Then I knew that I was sinking
+in cold water, and that I was fighting instinctively against the need to
+gasp and breathe fresh air. I kicked weakly and convulsively. I opened
+my eyes, and squeezed them as the bright green water stung them. Then I
+hung for an instant as if suspended over the depths, and began to rise.
+It seemed hours before I shot up into the open air again, and was
+drinking it deeply and thankfully into my tortured lungs. The sun
+touched my head warmly like the hand of a benign god.
+
+Floating gently, I lay there for a long while before I even looked about
+me. There was a vague confusion in my head, as if I had just awakened
+from a long sleep. Some memory seemed to be fading away, something I
+could still feel but couldn't understand. Then it was gone, and I was
+alone and empty, riding on the water.
+
+I glanced about, puzzled. Only a few yards away rose the gray stone side
+of the embankment, with its low parapet, and behind that the Drive.
+There was no one in sight--not even a car--and the open windows of the
+apartment houses across the Drive seemed very quiet. People slept behind
+them.
+
+It was only a little after dawn. The sun, blazing and tinted with pink,
+had hardly risen from the horizon. The lake was still lined with dark
+shadows behind glittering ridges of morning sunlight, and a cool breeze
+played across my face, coming in from the east. Over the city, the sound
+of a street car rumbling into motion, rising and dying away, was like
+the crowing of a rooster in the country.
+
+I shivered, and began to swim. A few strokes brought me to the
+embankment, and I clambered up, almost freezing as I left the water. I
+was fully clothed, but without a hat. Perhaps I had lost it in the lake.
+I stood there, dripping and chill, and suddenly I realized that I had
+just waked up in the water. I had no recollection of falling in, nor
+even of being there. I could remember nothing of the previous night.
+
+A glance along the Drive told me where I was, at the corner of
+Fifty-third street. My apartment was only a few blocks away. Had I been
+walking in my sleep? My mind was a blank, with turbulent, dim
+impressions moving confusedly under the surface.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Trembling in the chill air, I started up the Drive. I must go home and
+change at once. Something came back to me--a memory of talking to some
+friends at the Club. But was that last night? Or months ago? It was as
+though I had slept for months. We had had a few drinks--could I have
+been drunk, and fallen into the lake on my way home? But I never took
+more than two or three drinks. Something had happened.
+
+Then I remembered the stranger. We had all been sitting about the
+lounge, talking of something. What had we been discussing? Franklin had
+mentioned Einstein's new theory--we had played with that for a while,
+none of us with the least idea what it was about. Then the conversation
+had shifted slowly from one topic to another, all having to do with
+scientific discoveries.
+
+Somewhere in the midst of it, Barclay had come in. He brought with him a
+guest--a straight, fine-looking man with a military carriage, about
+fifty years old. Barclay had introduced him as Mr. Melbourne. He spoke
+with a slight southern accent.
+
+In some way Melbourne and I gravitated into a corner. We went on with
+the conversation while the others left it. They drifted into politics,
+drawing together about the table where the whisky stood, leaving us
+alone.
+
+Melbourne had been a fascinating man to talk to. He discussed topics
+ranging from theories of matter to the early Cretan culture, and related
+them all to one dominant scientific thread. He spoke like a man of wide
+knowledge and experience.... As I walked up the Drive, bits of his
+conversation came disjointedly back to me with the clarity and
+significance of sentences from Spengler.
+
+An early-morning taxi went by slowly as I crossed the Drive to my
+apartment. The driver stopped a moment, and looked at me in
+astonishment.
+
+"What's the matter, buddy," he said, "you look all wet. Fall in the
+lake?" I smiled, embarrassed.
+
+"Looks that way, doesn't it?" I answered.
+
+"Can I take you anywhere?"
+
+"No," I said, "I live here." He grinned, and started off again.
+
+"Wish I'd been in on that party!" he called back, as he drove away.
+
+I frowned, once more with that puzzled feeling, and went in.
+
+
+
+
+Melbourne's Story
+
+
+Glimpses of last night came back to me and pieced themselves together
+slowly while I undressed and drew the water for my bath.
+
+Melbourne had been interested to know that I worked for Bausch, the
+motion picture producer.
+
+"Perhaps you could be of aid to me some time," he said thoughtfully.
+
+"In what way, Mr. Melbourne?" I asked him.
+
+"I can talk to you about that later," he replied cryptically. "Tell me
+about your work."
+
+So I told him the conception I had of the motion pictures to be made in
+the future. He listened with keen interest.
+
+"I visualize a production going beyond anything done today," I said,
+"and yet one that would be possible now, if there were someone capable
+of creating it. A picture with sound and color, reproducing faithfully
+the ordinary life about us, its tints and voices, even the noises of the
+city--or traffic passing in the street and newsboys crying the scores of
+the afternoon games--vividly and naturally. My picture would be so
+carefully constructed that the projector could be stopped at any moment
+and the screen would show a scene as harmonious in design and
+composition and coloring, and as powerful in feeling, as a painting by
+Rockwell Kent." After a pause I added, "And I'd give almost anything if
+I could do it myself."
+
+Melbourne looked at me sympathetically, reflectively.
+
+"It might be possible," he said after a time.
+
+"What do you mean, Mr. Melbourne?" He puffed at a cigar, and considered.
+
+"It's not something I could explain to you off-hand," he said. "It's
+strange and it's new. It needs preparation."
+
+"I'm ready to listen," I said with eager interest. He smiled.
+
+"Perhaps I had better tell you a little of my life."
+
+"Go on," I answered briefly.
+
+"I had ideas much like yours when I was a boy," he began his story. "In
+high school and college I had believed myself an artist. I was a good
+musician, and I dabbled with painting and literature. I wanted to come
+back for post-graduate work, though, and something attracted me to
+science. I had put off studying mathematics until my graduating year,
+only to find that it fascinated me. And I was curious about physics.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"While I was studying for my Master's degree and my Doctorate, I felt
+the need of some interest to merge all the divergent sides of my nature.
+Something that would give me a chance to be both the artist and the man
+of science. That was a quarter of a century ago. The motion picture and
+the phonograph were just coming into the public eye. They seemed to
+supply just the field for which I felt a need.
+
+"I had much the same idea as yourself, except that there were no
+discoveries to back it--no color photography, no method for harmonizing
+sound and sight. Indeed, neither the screen nor the phonograph had come
+to be regarded yet as essentially more than a toy. But, like yourself,
+I had vision. And enthusiasm. And an intense desire to create.
+
+"After I had taken my degrees, I went to work with almost abnormal
+intensity. With sufficient income to live as I desired, I fitted up my
+laboratory and concentrated on the thing I wanted to do. I spent years
+at it. I gave my youth--or, at least, the best of my youth--to that
+labor. Long before sound and color pictures were perfected commercially,
+I had developed similar processes for myself. But they were not what I
+wanted. The real thing was beyond my grasp, and I couldn't see how to
+attain it.
+
+"I worked feverishly. I think I must have worked myself into a sort of
+frenzy, a sort of madness. I never mingled with people, and I became
+bitter and despondent. One day my nerves broke down. I smashed
+everything in my laboratory, all my models, all my apparatus, and I
+burned the plans and papers I had labored over for years.
+
+"My physician told me that I must rest and recuperate. He told me I must
+interest myself again in daily life, in people and inanimate things. So
+I went away. For the next few years I traveled. I tore myself away from
+everything scientific and plunged into the business of living. Almost
+overnight I became an adventurer, tasting sensations with the same
+ardor I had once given to my work. I went back to art, to painting and
+literature and music. I was a connoisseur of wines and of foods and of
+women. I was an experimenter with life.
+
+"Little by little, though, the zest of that passed away. I grew tired of
+my dilettantism. And eventually I found that, even while I had been
+moving about the world and experiencing its curious values, my mind had
+been grappling quietly, subconsciously, with my old problem. The change
+in my life had given me the wider outlook, the keener understanding
+necessary to the accomplishment of my task. In the end, I went back to
+it again with renewed vigor. With greater power, too, and greater
+sanity."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Melbourne paused here. Sensing his need, I brought him a highball, and
+one for myself. He tasted it with a quizzical expression.
+
+"They call this whisky nowadays!" he observed absently, with quiet
+irony. I wanted to hear the rest of his account.
+
+"Go on with your story, sir," I begged him.
+
+"The rest is simple enough--but it's the meat of the narrative. You see,
+I had to revise the way I was going about my work, and I went at it at a
+new angle. By this time wireless telegraphy was being widely developed,
+and there were many features of it that appealed to me. With the
+knowledge I had gained during my first feverish years of experiment,
+however, I was able to go far beyond what has been done in recent times
+with radio.
+
+"I used a system differing in many respects from that of the commercial
+radio. We haven't time now to go into all that--I can tell you later,
+and it involves much that is highly technical and still secret. It is
+sufficient if I explain that my object was to evolve and fuse methods
+for doing with each of the senses what radio does with sound.
+Telephotography was the simplest problem--the others required an almost
+superhuman amount of labor.
+
+"But my biggest job was to combine them. And, to do that, I had to use
+knowledge I had gained not only in the laboratory but in my wanderings
+about the earth--not only in the colleges and salons of Europe and
+America, but in the bazaars and temples of India, Egypt, China. I had to
+unite the lore of ancient and modern civilizations, and I created a new
+factor in electrical science. I suppose the simplest and most
+intelligible name for it would be mental telepathy. But it is more than
+that, and basically it is as simple and material as your own motion
+pictures."
+
+I think Melbourne would have gone on and told me more about his
+discoveries. At that moment, however, he paused to reflect, and we
+looked up to find the others leaving. The bottle of Scotch was empty.
+
+"Ready, Melbourne?" Barclay called. We rose.
+
+"I didn't realize it was so late," Melbourne answered. "Mr. Barrett and
+I have found each other most interesting."
+
+We all found our hats and went out. Melbourne and Barclay, each
+apologizing for having neglected the other, said good-bye. Barclay was
+tired and wanted to go to bed. He went off with the others, but
+Melbourne turned my way.
+
+"If you're not too weary of my company," he said, "I'll go with you a
+little way."
+
+"You know I'm not," I answered. "I've never been so interested in
+anything before. It sounds like a chapter from Wells, or Jules Verne."
+
+He smiled, with a little shake of his head, and we walked on for awhile
+in silence toward the lake....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All this came back to me swiftly and with an effect of incoherence, much
+as a dream moves, during the few moments when I was getting ready for my
+bath. I laid out my shaving things, and put a record on the Victrola. I
+have never quite conquered my need for music while I bathe and dress. I
+think the record was a Grieg nocturne--something cool and quiet, with a
+touch of acutely sweet pain and melancholy.
+
+Then I happened to glance at a mirror for the first time. I stood amazed
+and transfixed. Overnight I had grown a beard such as wanderers bring
+back with them from the wilderness. Under the beard, my face seemed to
+have altered somehow, to have changed in some peculiar way. Physically
+it appeared younger, with an expression of calm and repose such as I had
+never before seen on a man's face. But the eyes were wise and old, as
+if--overnight!--the mind behind them had learned the knowledge of all
+time.
+
+Or was it overnight? I could not lose that feeling that time had passed
+by since my last contact with ordinary life. It was as though, somewhere
+and somehow, I had lived for weeks or months in some new plane, and
+forgotten it. I felt richer and older than I had once felt, and the
+things I had been remembering seemed remote.
+
+At that moment, a chance strain from the machine in my living room
+brought back a whole new group of vivid impressions, strange and yet in
+a sense more familiar than my memories of Melbourne. They opened up to
+me a different life in which I seemed to have participated by chance,
+and a life which had, at first sight, no point of contact with the
+reality to which I had returned....
+
+
+
+
+A Chance Strain from Grieg
+
+
+I recalled waking up in another place, on a long slope of green hill
+that overlooked a valley. It was dawn again. The sun was just rising
+over the crest of the hill behind me, and it threw long shadows across
+the grass from the tall, slender trees along the summit. Down in the
+valley a broad, clean river of clear water followed the curve of the
+hill until it disappeared from sight. There were other hills beyond the
+river, all with the same long, simple slope of grass; and, beyond the
+hills, there were the tops of blue mountains, swathed in white morning
+mist.
+
+It was a strange place. Its strangeness consisted in a subtle appearance
+of order and care, as though a gardener or an army of gardeners had
+arranged and tended the whole vast sweep of landscape for years. It was
+uncultivated and deserted as waste land, but as well trimmed, in spite
+of its spaciousness, as a lawn.
+
+The morning was very warm. I was not conscious of any chill in the air.
+I was clothed only in short trousers, such as athletes wear, and a short
+belted tunic without sleeves and loose--both of them indescribably soft
+and comfortable.
+
+I was aware of the strangeness of my awakening, but I seemed to have no
+definite recollection of falling asleep. I felt that I had come there
+during my sleep under unusual circumstances and from a very different
+life, but the thought didn't disturb me or trouble my mind in any way.
+My chief emotion was a curious feeling of expectancy. I knew that I was
+about to have some new and curious experience, something not trivial,
+and I was eager to meet it.
+
+I lay there for awhile, drinking in the beauty of the morning, and
+breathing an air of miraculous purity and freshness. Finally I stood up,
+light and conscious of a sudden grace, aware for the first time, in its
+departure, of the awkwardness and weight which ordinarily attend our
+movements on earth. It was as if some of the earth's gravity had been
+lost.
+
+For a while I examined the valley, but I saw no sign of life there. Then
+I turned and went slowly up the hill, the sunlight falling warmly on my
+body, and my feet sinking sensuously in the deep grass.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I came to the crest and looked over, I saw another valley before
+me, deeper than the first. The hill rolled away, down and down for
+miles, to a long, wide plain. More hills rose from the plain on every
+side, as simply as if they had been built there by the hand of some
+gigantic child playing in a wilderness of sand. And the river, coming
+around the base of the hill on which I was standing, but several miles
+away, swept out upon a great aqueduct of stone, hundreds of feet high,
+which crossed the plain through its very center, a straight line of
+breath-taking beauty, and disappeared far away into the pass between two
+mountains. The whole scene was too perfect to be wholly natural.
+
+At the center of the plain stood a tall, white building. Even in the
+distance from which I viewed it, it looked massive--larger than any
+skyscraper I had ever seen. But it was delicately and intricately
+designed, terraced much as most modern office buildings in New York are
+terraced, but more elaborately. Its base stood about the aqueduct, which
+passed through it, and it swept up magnificently to a slender peak
+almost level with the crest of the hill where I was standing. It was the
+only building in sight.
+
+I don't know how long I stood there, admiring the clean sweep and
+vastness of the scene, before I saw something rise sharply, with a
+flashing of bright wings, from some hidden courtyard or terrace of the
+building. It was followed closely by another and then another, like a
+flight of birds. They shot up swiftly, circled once or twice, and moved
+away in different directions, straight and purposeful. One of them came
+toward my hill.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was only a few moments before the thing sped up to me and swooped
+down as I waved my arms. It was, of course, a machine, slender and long,
+with wide arching wings. It seemed almost light enough to float. It had
+a deck, shielded from the wind by a shimmering transparent thing like a
+thin wire screen, and under the deck a cabin made, it seemed, of glass.
+A man and a woman stood on the deck, the woman handling the controls.
+They were both dressed much like myself.
+
+The machine came to rest on the hill near me. I stepped forward, and the
+man leaped down to meet me. His first greeting was curious.
+
+"So you _are_ here," he said. His voice was small but cool, penetrating
+and metallic. I thought of fine steel wires. And, when I replied, my own
+voice had something of the same quality.
+
+"Were you expecting me?" I said. He nodded, shaking my hand briefly and
+quietly.
+
+"We know all about you," he answered. I was pleased--it made things
+simpler--but I wanted to ask him who I was. I didn't remember anything
+up to the moment of my awakening on the other side of the hill. Instead,
+I asked him:
+
+"Shall I go aboard?" He nodded again, and waved his hand toward the
+ladder. I went aboard lithely, and he followed. The girl and I glanced
+at each other; I was surprised and rather disturbed by her beauty and
+cleanness of body. I turned to the man, a little embarrassed, as she
+manipulated some controls and set the ship in motion again.
+
+"You'll have to forgive me," I said. "Something has happened, and I
+don't know things. I've completely lost my memory."
+
+They understood at once.
+
+"Your name is Baret." He pronounced it oddly. "I am Edvar, and this girl
+is Selda." We all looked at each other intently, and I went on
+hesitantly.
+
+"I don't know where I am. Can you tell me something about myself?" Edvar
+shook his head.
+
+"Only this," he said, "that we were notified of your presence and your
+name. This city is Richmond." I glanced about quickly.
+
+"Richmond!" I exclaimed. "Virginia?" But he shook his head.
+
+"I don't understand you," he replied.
+
+I went on, with a puzzled frown. "It has changed...." Both of them
+looked at me curiously.
+
+"How has it changed, Baret?" the girl, Selda, asked me. I glanced at her
+absently and closed my eyes.
+
+"Why ... I don't know," I stammered, "I don't remember." For a few
+moments there was silence, except for the shouting of the wind past our
+ship. Then Selda asked me another question.
+
+"Where are you from?" I shook my head helplessly, and answered again, "I
+don't know--I don't remember."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A moment later we dipped into the shadow of the building, which they
+called Richmond. We slipped by a succession of vast and intricate
+façades until we came to a court-like terrace, hundreds of feet above
+the ground and sheltered on three sides by walls that leaped up toward
+the sky for hundreds of feet more. The effect of height was dizzying and
+magnificent.
+
+Selda brought the ship to a quick and graceful landing. I found that we
+were in a large paved court like a public square, facing the east and
+the sun, which bathed it in cool bright light. It was still early in the
+morning. Innumerable windows looked down upon us, and a number of
+doorways led into the building on all sides. From one of these a girl
+stepped forward. Edvar spoke to her, evidently reporting himself and
+Selda. The girl pushed several buttons on a small cabinet which hung
+from her shoulder. It rang, low and silvery, twice. Then she pointed to
+me.
+
+"Who is that?" she asked.
+
+"His name is Baret," Edvar told her. "I was sent to meet him."
+
+"But where is he from? He is not registered."
+
+"We don't know. It's an unusual circumstance," he explained, while the
+girl examined us all carefully. "Very well," she said finally, "you must
+attend him until he is registered. I'll notify Odom." Edvar nodded, and
+we turned away.
+
+Glancing back as we crossed the court, I saw the ship descending
+noiselessly, on the square of pavement where it had landed, into the
+depths of the building, while the girl made other gestures with her
+little cabinet. Then we passed through a doorway into the subdued glow
+of artificial lighting.
+
+"Why was she so worried?" I asked Edvar. "I don't understand anything,
+you know."
+
+"You were not registered," he said. "We are all registered, of course,
+in our own cities. The authorities know where to find us at any moment
+of the day during our routine. If we leave the city, or depart from our
+usual program, naturally we note down where we are going, registering
+ourselves upon our departure and upon our return. If we visit another
+city, our arrival there is expected and reported here, as well as our
+departure."
+
+"Is all that necessary?" I asked him. "Is there a war, perhaps?"
+
+"No," he said, "it's customary. It prevents confusion. Everything we do
+is recorded. This conversation, for instance, is being recorded in the
+telepathic laboratory at this moment--each of us has a record there.
+They are open to the public at any time. It makes dishonor impossible."
+
+We paused at a doorway, and Edvar spoke a word. It opened noiselessly
+and we went into his apartment.
+
+"We are assigned to you this morning," Edvar said. "We are at your
+service."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+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.
+
+"So would I," she admitted. Then, in a low voice, she added, "But one
+can't. One has to follow one's program."
+
+We returned to the airship, raid rose into the cool, thin air. I stood
+behind her on the way back, watching her slender body as she guided the
+plane. Once in a while she would turn her head and look up at me over
+her shoulder, then quickly look away again.
+
+"Why is it," I asked her as we passed over the valleys and the river on
+our way home, "why is it that these hills have such a cultivated
+look--as though they had been laid out?" She glanced back, and smiled.
+
+"They _have_ been laid out," she said. "The hills, and the rivers, and
+the tallest mountains have all been constructed by our landscape artists
+in order to achieve their various effects. Even the line of the sea has
+been determined and arranged by the artists."
+
+"But why?" I said. "Wasn't it a frightful waste of energy?"
+
+"It didn't seem so to us," she answered. "We had no further need to
+cultivate the land except in small patches, when we learned the secret
+of artificial food. And we wanted to have perfect beauty about us. So we
+remodeled the outlines of the earth, and eliminated the insects and the
+harmful animals and the weeds. We made the land clean and fine as it had
+never been before."
+
+"It must have been a terrific labor."
+
+"It pleased us. Our instinct is to arrange and remodel things, to order
+our life so that we know what it is and what it will always be." She
+paused for a moment, and added in a low voice, "One is necessarily a
+determinist here."
+
+We said no more until our arrival in Richmond.
+
+It is not my purpose to detail here all that happened during the time I
+spent on that world. Most of it had to do with Selda, and our daily
+expeditions about the world. This is not, after all, a love story, but
+the account of a very strange experience; and, too, none of it was real.
+
+During my last week, a series of strange moods and happenings
+complicated my life. One day, after a visit to the sea with Selda, we
+were walking back to our plane across the sand. Without any warning,
+surrounded by the brilliant morning sunlight and the miles of sea and
+beach, I struck my knee against something hard and immovable, and,
+flinging out my hand to catch myself from falling, I clung to a hard
+surface like an iron railing. For a moment I was stunned and confused.
+The sunlight seemed to fade, and there was a vague hint of darkness all
+about me, with black walls looming up on all sides. It was as though I
+stood in two worlds at once, transfixed between night and day. Then the
+darkness went away, the sunlight brightened. I looked around, and found
+Selda watching me curiously, a little alarmed.
+
+"What happened, Baret?" she asked, puzzled. I shook my head in
+bewilderment.
+
+"I seemed to stumble--" I said. There was nothing underfoot but the soft
+sand, and where I had flung my hand against a sort of railing, there was
+nothing either. We went back to the airship in silence, both of us
+confused.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After that, with increasing frequency, there would come interruptions,
+like iron bars striking dark, jagged holes in the tissue of life. From
+time to time I heard inexplicable noises--the whirring of motors, the
+skid-skid of tires on invisible streets, the rumble of carts around
+corners of a world where there were no carts. Again and again those
+moments of confusion would come over me, when I seemed to be looking
+into two worlds at once, one superimposed upon the other, one bright,
+the other dark with faint points of light in the distance. Once, walking
+along the corridor beyond my room in Richmond, I collided with a man.
+For a moment the corridor faded completely. I stood on a street with
+dark houses about me. Overhead was the glow of a street-lamp, and a
+milk-cart was just rattling away around a corner. A man with a
+frightened face stood before me, his hat on the pavement, his eyes
+staring. We looked at each other in astonishment. I started to speak.
+Then he reached for his hat quickly, and brushed by me, muttering close
+to my ear.
+
+"For God's sake, look where you're going...."
+
+I stood in the corridor again, staring. Down the corridor, coming toward
+me, was a single figure--Selda. Behind me there was nobody. I went to
+meet Selda, dazed and uneasy. I could still hear, close to my ear, an
+echo of that muffled, hoarse voice that I had never heard before.
+
+That was two days before the end. We were leaving the city on that final
+bright morning, when a representative of the Bureau stopped us. I looked
+at him inquiringly.
+
+"I have come to tell you, Baret," he said, "that your departure is
+scheduled for this evening." I drew back, startled, and looked at Selda.
+
+"My departure?" I repeated in a low voice, hardly understanding. "So
+soon?" I had forgotten that one day I should have to leave.
+
+"It has been arranged," he said impersonally.
+
+We bowed slightly to each other, and he went away. Selda and I stepped
+aboard our ship in silence.
+
+That time we flew up the river until we came to the foothills of the
+mountains in the north. We landed in a little clearing by the river at
+the foot of a waterfall hundreds of feet high, towering over us. The
+forest stood about us on all sides, coming down to the river's brim on
+the opposite bank and meeting it not far from us on the near bank. The
+precipice, covered with moss and small bushes, stood above us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We sat a long while in silence, before I said bitterly:
+
+"So I must go."
+
+She didn't look at me, but answered quietly, "Yes, you must go."
+
+"I don't want to go," I cried, "I want to stay here!"
+
+"Why?" she asked me, averting her face.
+
+"Don't you know?" I said swiftly. "Haven't you understood long ago that
+I love you?" She shook her head.
+
+"Love is something that we don't know here--not until we have been
+married and lived with our men. Sometimes not then." But she looked at
+me, and I thought there were tears in her eyes. Suddenly the impulse I
+had been resisting ever since the morning on the mountain became
+insupportable, and I caught her in my arms almost roughly. Her face was
+close to mine, and she closed her eyes. I kissed her, forgetting
+everything but the knowledge that I had stumbled upon the sort of love
+that doesn't pass away, no matter how long a man lives.
+
+After a while, though, she drew away as if she resisted not my desire,
+but her own.
+
+"No--" she said in a low voice, "no...."
+
+"But Selda!" I stammered, "I love you--I want to marry you." She shook
+her head.
+
+"No," she said again, "didn't you understand? I am scheduled to marry
+Edvar."
+
+At first I didn't know what she meant.
+
+"Scheduled?" I repeated dully. "I don't understand."
+
+"It has been arranged for years. Don't you remember what Edvar told you
+about our marriages here, the very first day you came? I was destined to
+marry Edvar long before any of us were born, before our parents, even,
+were born. It's the way they order our lives."
+
+"But I love you," I cried in amazement. "And you love me, too. I know
+you love me."
+
+"That means nothing here," she said. "It happens sometimes. One has to
+accept it. Nothing can be done. We live according to the machinery of
+the world. Everything is known and predetermined."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Suddenly, in the midst of what she was saying, close behind me there
+sounded even above the roaring of the waterfall a raucous noise like the
+hooting of a taxi horn. It was followed by a shrieking of brakes, and a
+hoarse voice near by shouted something angry and profane. A rush of air
+swept by me, and I heard faintly the sound of a motor moving away, with
+a grinding of gears. I looked at Selda.
+
+"Did you hear that?"
+
+She nodded, with wide, frightened eyes. "Yes. It's not the first time."
+Suddenly she rose, frowning, as if with pain. "Come," she added, "now we
+must go back."
+
+There was nothing else to do. We went back silently to the airship, and
+turned its nose toward the city.
+
+But when I left her at her apartment, promising to see her later, I had
+one last hope in my mind. I went to the Bureau.
+
+The Bureau was a vast system of halls and offices, occupying two floors
+of the great building. I was sent from one automatic device to
+another--there were no human clerks--in search of the representative who
+had spoken to me before. Finally I found him in his apartment, down the
+corridor only a hundred feet or so from my own. He was pouring over a
+metal sheet on his table, where innumerable shifting figures were thrown
+by some hidden machine, and he was calculating with a set of hundreds of
+buttons along its edges. He spoke to me without pausing or looking up,
+and throughout my interview he continued with his figuring as if it had
+been entirely automatic--as perhaps it was.
+
+"What is it, Baret?" he said I felt like a small child before the
+principal of the school.
+
+"I have come to ask you whether it is necessary for me to go," I
+answered. He nodded slightly, never looking up.
+
+"It is necessary," he said. "Your visit was pre-arranged and definite."
+I made a gesture of remonstrance.
+
+"But I don't want to go," I insisted. "I like this place, and I am
+willing to fall into its life if I can remain under any conditions."
+
+"It is impossible," he objected angrily.
+
+"I have never been told why or how I came here. You said you would tell
+me that."
+
+"I have never been told myself. It is a matter known to the men who
+handled it."
+
+"If I went to them, surely they could find some way to let me stay?"
+
+"No," he said coldly, "the thing was as definite as every event that
+takes place here. We do not let things happen haphazardly. We do not
+alter what has been arranged. And even if it were possible to let you
+stay--which I am inclined to doubt--they would not permit it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Why not?" I asked dully.
+
+"Because there is no place for you. Our social system has been planned
+for hundreds of years ahead. Every individual of today and every
+individual of the next six generations has his definite place, his
+program, his work to do. There is no place for you. It is impossible to
+fit you in, for you have no work, no training, no need that you can
+fill. You have no woman, and there are no women for your children or
+your children's children. You are unnecessary. To fit you in, one would
+have to disrupt the whole system for generations ahead. It is
+impossible."
+
+I thought a moment, hopelessly.
+
+"If I made a place?" I suggested. "Suppose I took someone else's place?"
+He smiled, a faint, cold smile.
+
+"Murder? It is impossible. You are always under the control of the
+Bureau in some way, whether you are aware of it or not."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I turned away, a little dazed. The whole thing was inevitable and clear
+as he put it. I knew there was nothing to be done.
+
+I left his apartment, and went down the corridor to the landing stage.
+No one interfered with my movements, and my commands were not
+questioned. I ordered a plane, and gave my name to the girl in charge.
+
+"Your destination?" she asked.
+
+I said, "I am only going for pleasure."
+
+"Your return?"
+
+"Expect me in an hour."
+
+I had watched Selda pilot the planes for so many weeks that I was
+familiar with the controls. I rose swiftly, circled the building, and
+headed north toward the mountains. I hadn't the courage to see Selda
+again. It was only a little while before I came to the place by the
+river where we had spent the morning. I slowed down, and flew over it,
+just above the waterfall.
+
+There was a landing-spot by the river just beyond the top of the fall. I
+came to rest there, and left the machine.
+
+I stood looking at the river for a moment. I don't remember that any
+thoughts or emotions came to my mind. I simply stood there, a little
+dazed, and very quiet, with a vague picture of Selda before my eyes. It
+was a dream-like moment.
+
+Then I slipped over the river's bank, into the water, and the swift
+current, catching me up and whirling me around dizzily, carried me
+toward the edge of the waterfall.
+
+
+
+
+And So to Work
+
+
+I glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was five minutes to eight: time
+to leave, if I was to get a decent breakfast before I went to the
+office. I found an old hat in the closet and put it on. It would do
+until I had time to buy another.
+
+Last night--and this morning. Last night, after supper, I had dropped by
+the Club for a drink. And met Melbourne. This morning I woke in the
+water of the lake, and came home, and dressed. And went to work. Twelve
+hours--and in that time I had lived two months. I had fallen in love,
+and died. Now I must go to work.
+
+As I left the apartment, and turned west away from the Drive, toward the
+street cars, I was whistling over and over a brief snatch of music. Was
+it Grieg? Or some composer never heard on earth?
+
+There were people on the street now. They went by with frowning, intent
+faces--on their way to work. And cars rolling by, pausing at the cross
+streets with little squealings of brakes.
+
+Everything was so simple now. I went over it all as I waited for the
+street car, and as I rode down town. It was strange that Melbourne had
+never foreseen that one possibility among so many.
+
+We had sat down in our chairs, and then the adventure had begun. I
+had felt the sensation of moving about, of going from place to place.
+When I was a child I used to have dreams of walking about the
+house and about the streets. I would wake up on the stairs, or at the
+door--sleep-walking. Reflexes did it. I had left the chair, under the
+influence of the story in the Chamber of Life, and gone out of the room.
+I remembered now all those brief moments, when I had seemed poised on
+the brink of the real world--the stumbling against some hard object, the
+face under the street-lamp, the taxi, the voices. I had been going
+through the dark streets, with closed eyes, going toward the
+Drive--sleep-walking. And when I slipped over the bank of the river, in
+the dream, and down into the water--in reality I had gone over the side
+of the Drive, and down into the cold lake.
+
+It had been dawn.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I left the car, and walked down the street, lost in the midst of the
+crowds hurrying about me. It was all over, gone like one of those old
+dreams of my childhood. I could never forget it--never forget Selda--but
+it was gone. It had never existed. It had been cruel of Melbourne, cruel
+and ironic, to put Selda in the dream. But perhaps he had never realized
+that it would last over into reality.
+
+I had no hope of seeing her again, even in the Chamber. I knew I could
+never find Melbourne's home: I had paid no attention to the way the
+taxi-driver took. And I wasn't very much interested now. It was only a
+dream. I had lost the only girl I had ever loved, in a dream.
+
+I pushed open the door of the Norfolk Lunch. It was late--I had only a
+little while for breakfast. I sat down at one of the tables, and spoke
+to the waiter in much the usual manner.
+
+"Hello, Joe. I'm in a hurry--bring me bacon and eggs, as usual."
+
+"Coffee, Mr. Barrett?"
+
+"Yes, coffee too. And hurry it up."
+
+It wouldn't do to be late at the office, where I, too, was a maker of
+sometimes cruel dreams.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Chamber of Life, by Green Peyton Wertenbaker
+
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Chamber of Life, by Green Peyton Wertenbaker
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Chamber of Life
+
+Author: Green Peyton Wertenbaker
+
+Illustrator: Austin Briggs
+
+Release Date: June 21, 2008 [EBook #25862]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHAMBER OF LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Annie McGuire and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="transnote">
+<p>
+Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories July 1962,
+a reprint from Amazing Stories October 1929. Extensive
+research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
+copyright on this publication was renewed.<br />
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<h4>A Classic Reprint from AMAZING STORIES, October, 1929</h4>
+
+<h4>Illustrated by BRIGGS</h4>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 425px;"><br />
+<img src="images/illo-096.jpg" width="425" height="600" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<h1>The CHAMBER of LIFE</h1>
+
+<h2>By G. PEYTON WERTENBAKER</h2>
+
+<h2><i>Copyright 1929 by E.&nbsp;P. Inc.</i></h2>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="A_Strange_Awakening" id="A_Strange_Awakening"></a>A Strange Awakening</h3>
+
+<p>My first sensation was one of sudden and intense cold&mdash;a chill that shot
+through my body and engulfed it like a charge of electricity. For a
+moment I was conscious of nothing else. Then I knew that I was sinking
+in cold water, and that I was fighting instinctively against the need to
+gasp and breathe fresh air. I kicked weakly and convulsively. I opened
+my eyes, and squeezed them as the bright green water stung them. Then I
+hung for an instant as if suspended over the depths, and began to rise.
+It seemed hours before I shot up into the open air again, and was
+drinking it deeply and thankfully into my tortured lungs. The sun
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span>touched my head warmly like the hand of a benign god.</p>
+
+<p>Floating gently, I lay there for a long while before I even looked about
+me. There was a vague confusion in my head, as if I had just awakened
+from a long sleep. Some memory seemed to be fading away, something I
+could still feel but couldn't understand. Then it was gone, and I was
+alone and empty, riding on the water.</p>
+
+<p>I glanced about, puzzled. Only a few yards away rose the gray stone side
+of the embankment, with its low parapet, and behind that the Drive.
+There was no one in sight&mdash;not even a car&mdash;and the open windows of the
+apartment houses across the Drive seemed very quiet. People slept behind
+them.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span></p><p>It was only a little after dawn. The sun, blazing and tinted with pink,
+had hardly risen from the horizon. The lake was still lined with dark
+shadows behind glittering ridges of morning sunlight, and a cool breeze
+played across my face, coming in from the east. Over the city, the sound
+of a street car rumbling into motion, rising and dying away, was like
+the crowing of a rooster in the country.</p>
+
+<p>I shivered, and began to swim. A few strokes brought me to the
+embankment, and I clambered up, almost freezing as I left the water. I
+was fully clothed, but without a hat. Perhaps I had lost it in the lake.
+I stood there, dripping and chill, and suddenly I realized that I had
+just waked up in the water. I had no recollection of falling in, nor
+even of being there. I could remember nothing of the previous night.</p>
+
+<p>A glance along the Drive told me where I was, at the corner of
+Fifty-third street. My apartment was only a few blocks away. Had I been
+walking in my sleep? My mind was a blank, with turbulent, dim
+impressions moving confusedly under the surface.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Trembling in the chill air, I started up the Drive. I must go home and
+change at once. Something came back to me&mdash;a memory of talking to some
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>friends at the Club. But was that last night? Or months ago? It was as
+though I had slept for months. We had had a few drinks&mdash;could I have
+been drunk, and fallen into the lake on my way home? But I never took
+more than two or three drinks. Something had happened.</p>
+
+<p>Then I remembered the stranger. We had all been sitting about the
+lounge, talking of something. What had we been discussing? Franklin had
+mentioned Einstein's new theory&mdash;we had played with that for a while,
+none of us with the least idea what it was about. Then the conversation
+had shifted slowly from one topic to another, all having to do with
+scientific discoveries.</p>
+
+<p>Somewhere in the midst of it, Barclay had come in. He brought with him a
+guest&mdash;a straight, fine-looking man with a military carriage, about
+fifty years old. Barclay had introduced him as Mr. Melbourne. He spoke
+with a slight southern accent.</p>
+
+<p>In some way Melbourne and I gravitated into a corner. We went on with
+the conversation while the others left it. They drifted into politics,
+drawing together about the table where the whisky stood, leaving us
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>Melbourne had been a fascinating man to talk to. He discussed topics
+ranging from theories of matter to the early Cretan culture, and related
+them all to one dominant scientific thread. He spoke like a man of wide
+knowledge<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> and experience.... As I walked up the Drive, bits of his
+conversation came disjointedly back to me with the clarity and
+significance of sentences from Spengler.</p>
+
+<p>An early-morning taxi went by slowly as I crossed the Drive to my
+apartment. The driver stopped a moment, and looked at me in
+astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter, buddy," he said, "you look all wet. Fall in the
+lake?" I smiled, embarrassed.</p>
+
+<p>"Looks that way, doesn't it?" I answered.</p>
+
+<p>"Can I take you anywhere?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," I said, "I live here." He grinned, and started off again.</p>
+
+<p>"Wish I'd been in on that party!" he called back, as he drove away.</p>
+
+<p>I frowned, once more with that puzzled feeling, and went in.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="Melbournes_Story" id="Melbournes_Story"></a>Melbourne's Story</h3>
+
+<p>Glimpses of last night came back to me and pieced themselves together
+slowly while I undressed and drew the water for my bath.</p>
+
+<p>Melbourne had been interested to know that I worked for Bausch, the
+motion picture producer.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you could be of aid to me some time," he said thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"In what way, Mr. Melbourne?" I asked him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I can talk to you about that later," he replied cryptically. "Tell me
+about your work."</p>
+
+<p>So I told him the conception I had of the motion pictures to be made in
+the future. He listened with keen interest.</p>
+
+<p>"I visualize a production going beyond anything done today," I said,
+"and yet one that would be possible now, if there were someone capable
+of creating it. A picture with sound and color, reproducing faithfully
+the ordinary life about us, its tints and voices, even the noises of the
+city&mdash;or traffic passing in the street and newsboys crying the scores of
+the afternoon games&mdash;vividly and naturally. My picture would be so
+carefully constructed that the projector could be stopped at any moment
+and the screen would show a scene as harmonious in design and
+composition and coloring, and as powerful in feeling, as a painting by
+Rockwell Kent." After a pause I added, "And I'd give almost anything if
+I could do it myself."</p>
+
+<p>Melbourne looked at me sympathetically, reflectively.</p>
+
+<p>"It might be possible," he said after a time.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean, Mr. Melbourne?" He puffed at a cigar, and considered.</p>
+
+<p>"It's not something I could explain to you off-hand," he said. "It's
+strange and it's new. It needs preparation."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I'm ready to listen," I said with eager interest. He smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps I had better tell you a little of my life."</p>
+
+<p>"Go on," I answered briefly.</p>
+
+<p>"I had ideas much like yours when I was a boy," he began his story. "In
+high school and college I had believed myself an artist. I was a good
+musician, and I dabbled with painting and literature. I wanted to come
+back for post-graduate work, though, and something attracted me to
+science. I had put off studying mathematics until my graduating year,
+only to find that it fascinated me. And I was curious about physics.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"While I was studying for my Master's degree and my Doctorate, I felt
+the need of some interest to merge all the divergent sides of my nature.
+Something that would give me a chance to be both the artist and the man
+of science. That was a quarter of a century ago. The motion picture and
+the phonograph were just coming into the public eye. They seemed to
+supply just the field for which I felt a need.</p>
+
+<p>"I had much the same idea as yourself, except that there were no
+discoveries to back it&mdash;no color photography, no method for harmonizing
+sound and sight. Indeed, neither the screen nor the phonograph had come
+to be regarded yet as essentially more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> than a toy. But, like yourself,
+I had vision. And enthusiasm. And an intense desire to create.</p>
+
+<p>"After I had taken my degrees, I went to work with almost abnormal
+intensity. With sufficient income to live as I desired, I fitted up my
+laboratory and concentrated on the thing I wanted to do. I spent years
+at it. I gave my youth&mdash;or, at least, the best of my youth&mdash;to that
+labor. Long before sound and color pictures were perfected commercially,
+I had developed similar processes for myself. But they were not what I
+wanted. The real thing was beyond my grasp, and I couldn't see how to
+attain it.</p>
+
+<p>"I worked feverishly. I think I must have worked myself into a sort of
+frenzy, a sort of madness. I never mingled with people, and I became
+bitter and despondent. One day my nerves broke down. I smashed
+everything in my laboratory, all my models, all my apparatus, and I
+burned the plans and papers I had labored over for years.</p>
+
+<p>"My physician told me that I must rest and recuperate. He told me I must
+interest myself again in daily life, in people and inanimate things. So
+I went away. For the next few years I traveled. I tore myself away from
+everything scientific and plunged into the business of living. Almost
+overnight I became an adventurer, tasting sensations with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> the same
+ardor I had once given to my work. I went back to art, to painting and
+literature and music. I was a connoisseur of wines and of foods and of
+women. I was an experimenter with life.</p>
+
+<p>"Little by little, though, the zest of that passed away. I grew tired of
+my dilettantism. And eventually I found that, even while I had been
+moving about the world and experiencing its curious values, my mind had
+been grappling quietly, subconsciously, with my old problem. The change
+in my life had given me the wider outlook, the keener understanding
+necessary to the accomplishment of my task. In the end, I went back to
+it again with renewed vigor. With greater power, too, and greater
+sanity."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Melbourne paused here. Sensing his need, I brought him a highball, and
+one for myself. He tasted it with a quizzical expression.</p>
+
+<p>"They call this whisky nowadays!" he observed absently, with quiet
+irony. I wanted to hear the rest of his account.</p>
+
+<p>"Go on with your story, sir," I begged him.</p>
+
+<p>"The rest is simple enough&mdash;but it's the meat of the narrative. You see,
+I had to revise the way I was going about my work, and I went at it at a
+new angle. By this time wireless telegraphy was being<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> widely developed,
+and there were many features of it that appealed to me. With the
+knowledge I had gained during my first feverish years of experiment,
+however, I was able to go far beyond what has been done in recent times
+with radio.</p>
+
+<p>"I used a system differing in many respects from that of the commercial
+radio. We haven't time now to go into all that&mdash;I can tell you later,
+and it involves much that is highly technical and still secret. It is
+sufficient if I explain that my object was to evolve and fuse methods
+for doing with each of the senses what radio does with sound.
+Telephotography was the simplest problem&mdash;the others required an almost
+superhuman amount of labor.</p>
+
+<p>"But my biggest job was to combine them. And, to do that, I had to use
+knowledge I had gained not only in the laboratory but in my wanderings
+about the earth&mdash;not only in the colleges and salons of Europe and
+America, but in the bazaars and temples of India, Egypt, China. I had to
+unite the lore of ancient and modern civilizations, and I created a new
+factor in electrical science. I suppose the simplest and most
+intelligible name for it would be mental telepathy. But it is more than
+that, and basically it is as simple and material as your own motion
+pictures."</p>
+
+<p>I think Melbourne would have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> gone on and told me more about his
+discoveries. At that moment, however, he paused to reflect, and we
+looked up to find the others leaving. The bottle of Scotch was empty.</p>
+
+<p>"Ready, Melbourne?" Barclay called. We rose.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't realize it was so late," Melbourne answered. "Mr. Barrett and
+I have found each other most interesting."</p>
+
+<p>We all found our hats and went out. Melbourne and Barclay, each
+apologizing for having neglected the other, said good-bye. Barclay was
+tired and wanted to go to bed. He went off with the others, but
+Melbourne turned my way.</p>
+
+<p>"If you're not too weary of my company," he said, "I'll go with you a
+little way."</p>
+
+<p>"You know I'm not," I answered. "I've never been so interested in
+anything before. It sounds like a chapter from Wells, or Jules Verne."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled, with a little shake of his head, and we walked on for awhile
+in silence toward the lake....</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>All this came back to me swiftly and with an effect of incoherence, much
+as a dream moves, during the few moments when I was getting ready for my
+bath. I laid out my shaving things, and put a record on the Victrola. I
+have never quite conquered my need for music while<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> I bathe and dress. I
+think the record was a Grieg nocturne&mdash;something cool and quiet, with a
+touch of acutely sweet pain and melancholy.</p>
+
+<p>Then I happened to glance at a mirror for the first time. I stood amazed
+and transfixed. Overnight I had grown a beard such as wanderers bring
+back with them from the wilderness. Under the beard, my face seemed to
+have altered somehow, to have changed in some peculiar way. Physically
+it appeared younger, with an expression of calm and repose such as I had
+never before seen on a man's face. But the eyes were wise and old, as
+if&mdash;overnight!&mdash;the mind behind them had learned the knowledge of all
+time.</p>
+
+<p>Or was it overnight? I could not lose that feeling that time had passed
+by since my last contact with ordinary life. It was as though, somewhere
+and somehow, I had lived for weeks or months in some new plane, and
+forgotten it. I felt richer and older than I had once felt, and the
+things I had been remembering seemed remote.</p>
+
+<p>At that moment, a chance strain from the machine in my living room
+brought back a whole new group of vivid impressions, strange and yet in
+a sense more familiar than my memories of Melbourne. They opened up to
+me a different life in which I seemed to have participated by chance,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>
+and a life which had, at first sight, no point of contact with the
+reality to which I had returned....</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="A_Chance_Strain_from_Grieg" id="A_Chance_Strain_from_Grieg"></a>A Chance Strain from Grieg</h3>
+
+<p>I recalled waking up in another place, on a long slope of green hill
+that overlooked a valley. It was dawn again. The sun was just rising
+over the crest of the hill behind me, and it threw long shadows across
+the grass from the tall, slender trees along the summit. Down in the
+valley a broad, clean river of clear water followed the curve of the
+hill until it disappeared from sight. There were other hills beyond the
+river, all with the same long, simple slope of grass; and, beyond the
+hills, there were the tops of blue mountains, swathed in white morning
+mist.</p>
+
+<p>It was a strange place. Its strangeness consisted in a subtle appearance
+of order and care, as though a gardener or an army of gardeners had
+arranged and tended the whole vast sweep of landscape for years. It was
+uncultivated and deserted as waste land, but as well trimmed, in spite
+of its spaciousness, as a lawn.</p>
+
+<p>The morning was very warm. I was not conscious of any chill in the air.
+I was clothed only in short trousers, such as athletes wear, and a short
+belted tunic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> without sleeves and loose&mdash;both of them indescribably soft
+and comfortable.</p>
+
+<p>I was aware of the strangeness of my awakening, but I seemed to have no
+definite recollection of falling asleep. I felt that I had come there
+during my sleep under unusual circumstances and from a very different
+life, but the thought didn't disturb me or trouble my mind in any way.
+My chief emotion was a curious feeling of expectancy. I knew that I was
+about to have some new and curious experience, something not trivial,
+and I was eager to meet it.</p>
+
+<p>I lay there for awhile, drinking in the beauty of the morning, and
+breathing an air of miraculous purity and freshness. Finally I stood up,
+light and conscious of a sudden grace, aware for the first time, in its
+departure, of the awkwardness and weight which ordinarily attend our
+movements on earth. It was as if some of the earth's gravity had been
+lost.</p>
+
+<p>For a while I examined the valley, but I saw no sign of life there. Then
+I turned and went slowly up the hill, the sunlight falling warmly on my
+body, and my feet sinking sensuously in the deep grass.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>When I came to the crest and looked over, I saw another valley before
+me, deeper than the first. The hill rolled away, down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> and down for
+miles, to a long, wide plain. More hills rose from the plain on every
+side, as simply as if they had been built there by the hand of some
+gigantic child playing in a wilderness of sand. And the river, coming
+around the base of the hill on which I was standing, but several miles
+away, swept out upon a great aqueduct of stone, hundreds of feet high,
+which crossed the plain through its very center, a straight line of
+breath-taking beauty, and disappeared far away into the pass between two
+mountains. The whole scene was too perfect to be wholly natural.</p>
+
+<p>At the center of the plain stood a tall, white building. Even in the
+distance from which I viewed it, it looked massive&mdash;larger than any
+skyscraper I had ever seen. But it was delicately and intricately
+designed, terraced much as most modern office buildings in New York are
+terraced, but more elaborately. Its base stood about the aqueduct, which
+passed through it, and it swept up magnificently to a slender peak
+almost level with the crest of the hill where I was standing. It was the
+only building in sight.</p>
+
+<p>I don't know how long I stood there, admiring the clean sweep and
+vastness of the scene, before I saw something rise sharply, with a
+flashing of bright wings, from some hidden courtyard or terrace of the
+building. It was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> followed closely by another and then another, like a
+flight of birds. They shot up swiftly, circled once or twice, and moved
+away in different directions, straight and purposeful. One of them came
+toward my hill.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It was only a few moments before the thing sped up to me and swooped
+down as I waved my arms. It was, of course, a machine, slender and long,
+with wide arching wings. It seemed almost light enough to float. It had
+a deck, shielded from the wind by a shimmering transparent thing like a
+thin wire screen, and under the deck a cabin made, it seemed, of glass.
+A man and a woman stood on the deck, the woman handling the controls.
+They were both dressed much like myself.</p>
+
+<p>The machine came to rest on the hill near me. I stepped forward, and the
+man leaped down to meet me. His first greeting was curious.</p>
+
+<p>"So you <i>are</i> here," he said. His voice was small but cool, penetrating
+and metallic. I thought of fine steel wires. And, when I replied, my own
+voice had something of the same quality.</p>
+
+<p>"Were you expecting me?" I said. He nodded, shaking my hand briefly and
+quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"We know all about you," he answered. I was pleased&mdash;it made things
+simpler&mdash;but I wanted to ask him who I was. I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> didn't remember anything
+up to the moment of my awakening on the other side of the hill. Instead,
+I asked him:</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I go aboard?" He nodded again, and waved his hand toward the
+ladder. I went aboard lithely, and he followed. The girl and I glanced
+at each other; I was surprised and rather disturbed by her beauty and
+cleanness of body. I turned to the man, a little embarrassed, as she
+manipulated some controls and set the ship in motion again.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll have to forgive me," I said. "Something has happened, and I
+don't know things. I've completely lost my memory."</p>
+
+<p>They understood at once.</p>
+
+<p>"Your name is Baret." He pronounced it oddly. "I am Edvar, and this girl
+is Selda." We all looked at each other intently, and I went on
+hesitantly.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know where I am. Can you tell me something about myself?" Edvar
+shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Only this," he said, "that we were notified of your presence and your
+name. This city is Richmond." I glanced about quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"Richmond!" I exclaimed. "Virginia?" But he shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't understand you," he replied.</p>
+
+<p>I went on, with a puzzled frown. "It has changed...." Both of them
+looked at me curiously.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"How has it changed, Baret?" the girl, Selda, asked me. I glanced at her
+absently and closed my eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Why ... I don't know," I stammered, "I don't remember." For a few
+moments there was silence, except for the shouting of the wind past our
+ship. Then Selda asked me another question.</p>
+
+<p>"Where are you from?" I shook my head helplessly, and answered again, "I
+don't know&mdash;I don't remember."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>A moment later we dipped into the shadow of the building, which they
+called Richmond. We slipped by a succession of vast and intricate
+fa&ccedil;ades until we came to a court-like terrace, hundreds of feet above
+the ground and sheltered on three sides by walls that leaped up toward
+the sky for hundreds of feet more. The effect of height was dizzying and
+magnificent.</p>
+
+<p>Selda brought the ship to a quick and graceful landing. I found that we
+were in a large paved court like a public square, facing the east and
+the sun, which bathed it in cool bright light. It was still early in the
+morning. Innumerable windows looked down upon us, and a number of
+doorways led into the building on all sides. From one of these a girl
+stepped forward. Edvar spoke to her, evidently reporting himself and
+Selda. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> girl pushed several buttons on a small cabinet which hung
+from her shoulder. It rang, low and silvery, twice. Then she pointed to
+me.</p>
+
+<p>"Who is that?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"His name is Baret," Edvar told her. "I was sent to meet him."</p>
+
+<p>"But where is he from? He is not registered."</p>
+
+<p>"We don't know. It's an unusual circumstance," he explained, while the
+girl examined us all carefully. "Very well," she said finally, "you must
+attend him until he is registered. I'll notify Odom." Edvar nodded, and
+we turned away.</p>
+
+<p>Glancing back as we crossed the court, I saw the ship descending
+noiselessly, on the square of pavement where it had landed, into the
+depths of the building, while the girl made other gestures with her
+little cabinet. Then we passed through a doorway into the subdued glow
+of artificial lighting.</p>
+
+<p>"Why was she so worried?" I asked Edvar. "I don't understand anything,
+you know."</p>
+
+<p>"You were not registered," he said. "We are all registered, of course,
+in our own cities. The authorities know where to find us at any moment
+of the day during our routine. If we leave the city, or depart from our
+usual program, naturally we note down where we are going, registering<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+ourselves upon our departure and upon our return. If we visit another
+city, our arrival there is expected and reported here, as well as our
+departure."</p>
+
+<p>"Is all that necessary?" I asked him. "Is there a war, perhaps?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said, "it's customary. It prevents confusion. Everything we do
+is recorded. This conversation, for instance, is being recorded in the
+telepathic laboratory at this moment&mdash;each of us has a record there.
+They are open to the public at any time. It makes dishonor impossible."</p>
+
+<p>We paused at a doorway, and Edvar spoke a word. It opened noiselessly
+and we went into his apartment.</p>
+
+<p>"We are assigned to you this morning," Edvar said. "We are at your
+service."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing I noted when we sat down was the absence of any small
+articles&mdash;books or papers or lamps&mdash;and I remarked on this, somewhat
+rudely perhaps, to Edvar.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"We have had our breakfast," he explained, and I began to eat<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"Your life is amazingly centralized," I said. "Apparently all the things
+you need are supplied at your rooms on a moment's notice."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"
+He paused. "Would you care for some music?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;Grieg, or some other composer, with
+whom I was unfamiliar, exotic and reminiscent in mood, cool, and quiet
+with a touch of acutely sweet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"Have you no private possessions?" I asked. "Things that you share with
+no one? Your own books, your own music, your own jewelry, perhaps?"</p>
+
+<p>"We have no need of them," he replied. After a moment's thought, he
+added, "We have our own emotions, and our own work&mdash;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&mdash;as you can see." He made a gesture about the room.</p>
+
+<p>"And who serves you with those meals, and the music, and the knowledge
+you learn in your sleep? Who does the work?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;our
+machines are the basic structure of our life. But we have men, highly
+trained and fitted temperamentally for their professions,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>"And the rest of the time?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"You must live under a sort of socialistic system," I said thoughtfully.
+"Even a sort of communism?"</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"But how did you develop so highly technical a civilization?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"We came to it gradually from the last government system. It was called
+the <i>phrenarchic system</i>&mdash;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."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"You are Baret?" he said, looking at me keenly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I replied.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>With a slight bow, he turned to go. But I detained him.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait," I said. "Can you tell me who I am, and where I've come from?"</p>
+
+<p>"We are not yet certain. Our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>And the lake? Melbourne?</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;perhaps last night. We had gone on a while in silence,
+both of us thinking. Then we had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> come to the Drive. At that moment
+Melbourne had said something&mdash;what was it?</p>
+
+<p>He had said, "Tell me, Mr. Barrett, would you care to see that dream of
+yours come true?"</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="The_Chamber_of_Life" id="The_Chamber_of_Life"></a>The Chamber of Life</h3>
+
+<p>I didn't know what Melbourne meant, and I looked at him inquiringly.</p>
+
+<p>He explained: "I have in my home a model&mdash;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&mdash;although, of course, it can't be. I have verified my work
+dozens of times, step by step.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"But, Mr. Melbourne," I said, "why have you chosen me&mdash;a man you've only
+met this evening?" He smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"I am a lonely man, almost a recluse, Mr. Barrett," he answered. "I have
+many friends in many countries&mdash;but no intimates. It is the penalty of a
+man's devotion to one single and absorbing task. And, too, I think<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> you
+share a little of my interest in this particular task."</p>
+
+<p>"I do, sir! It has fascinated me," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"This will be quicker," he said. "After all, I am more excited about it
+myself than I should care to admit."</p>
+
+<p>As we turned and went on up the Drive, he told me more about his
+invention.</p>
+
+<p>"I call it the Chamber of Life," he said. "It's a fantastic name, but it
+designates precisely what my instrument is.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> like actually living the books you would read today, or the
+motion pictures and plays you would watch and hear.</p>
+
+<p>"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 <i>tempo</i> 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."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> night&mdash;especially
+when they are returning from parties. I suppose they manage it
+somehow&mdash;perhaps by signs cut in the trees, like primitive Indians.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;taste touch as well as sound and
+vision. And thought-processes had to be included. I had this advantage,
+however&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;the future, if you like, or the life on another planet."</p>
+
+<p>At this moment we turned into a dark driveway and skirted a large lawn
+for several hundred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> yards, up to Melbourne's home. It was a large
+house, dark at the moment, like the colonial houses you see in
+Virginia&mdash;the real ones, not the recent imitations that consist of
+little except the spotless white columns, which Jefferson adopted from
+the Greeks.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"This is a harmless drug," he explained. "It will paralyze some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I seated myself in one of the chairs, yawning a little. Melbourne,
+working at the dials, noticed my yawn and observed approvingly.</p>
+
+<p>"That's good. The more deadened your body is to real sensations&mdash;the
+nearer it is to sleep&mdash;the better and more vivid will be your
+impressions." He pressed several buttons, and twisted a dial with
+sensitive fingers.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, concentrate for a moment on the word <i>Venus</i>," 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.</p>
+
+<p>"That gave me your wavelength,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> he explained. "I have set it for my own
+as well&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>He came forward to the other chair, and sat down.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>We reached for each other's hands, and shook them quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"Good luck," I said. "The outcome of this means almost as much to me as
+it does to you." With another smile, Melbourne answered:</p>
+
+<p>"Good luck to you, then, too."</p>
+
+<p>At that moment the lights went off, and we sat there a few moments in
+total darkness....</p>
+
+<p>Remembering this scene, as I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> bathed that morning when I came out of the
+lake, I began to understand more clearly what had happened to me.
+Evidently, then, it <i>had</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="Baret_and_Selda" id="Baret_and_Selda"></a>Baret and Selda</h3>
+
+<p>I remember that I lived nearly two months&mdash;or so it seemed&mdash;in that
+other world. I was assigned an apartment near to Edvar's&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> study, the rest of his time flying about the world
+on curious expeditions of discovery&mdash;examining the soil, I suppose, and
+investigating the customs and records of other cities.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> 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&mdash;perhaps a
+keen eye could have found them, tiny white dots crouching upon the
+earth.</p>
+
+<p>I turned to Selda&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> something startled and unfathomable.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"You belong here more than I do, Baret," she said. "You came to us, not
+from the city, but from the hills."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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&mdash;not for myself, but for her.
+It was strange.</p>
+
+<p>"Come," she said at last, "we had better go back."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd like to stay here forever," I answered moodily, glancing around a
+last time at the versatile horizon.</p>
+
+<p>"So would I," she admitted. Then, in a low voice, she added,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> "But one
+can't. One has to follow one's program."</p>
+
+<p>We returned to the airship, raid rose into the cool, thin air. I stood
+behind her on the way back, watching her slender body as she guided the
+plane. Once in a while she would turn her head and look up at me over
+her shoulder, then quickly look away again.</p>
+
+<p>"Why is it," I asked her as we passed over the valleys and the river on
+our way home, "why is it that these hills have such a cultivated
+look&mdash;as though they had been laid out?" She glanced back, and smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"They <i>have</i> been laid out," she said. "The hills, and the rivers, and
+the tallest mountains have all been constructed by our landscape artists
+in order to achieve their various effects. Even the line of the sea has
+been determined and arranged by the artists."</p>
+
+<p>"But why?" I said. "Wasn't it a frightful waste of energy?"</p>
+
+<p>"It didn't seem so to us," she answered. "We had no further need to
+cultivate the land except in small patches, when we learned the secret
+of artificial food. And we wanted to have perfect beauty about us. So we
+remodeled the outlines of the earth, and eliminated the insects and the
+harmful animals and the weeds. We made the land clean and fine as it had
+never been before."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"It must have been a terrific labor."</p>
+
+<p>"It pleased us. Our instinct is to arrange and remodel things, to order
+our life so that we know what it is and what it will always be." She
+paused for a moment, and added in a low voice, "One is necessarily a
+determinist here."</p>
+
+<p>We said no more until our arrival in Richmond.</p>
+
+<p>It is not my purpose to detail here all that happened during the time I
+spent on that world. Most of it had to do with Selda, and our daily
+expeditions about the world. This is not, after all, a love story, but
+the account of a very strange experience; and, too, none of it was real.</p>
+
+<p>During my last week, a series of strange moods and happenings
+complicated my life. One day, after a visit to the sea with Selda, we
+were walking back to our plane across the sand. Without any warning,
+surrounded by the brilliant morning sunlight and the miles of sea and
+beach, I struck my knee against something hard and immovable, and,
+flinging out my hand to catch myself from falling, I clung to a hard
+surface like an iron railing. For a moment I was stunned and confused.
+The sunlight seemed to fade, and there was a vague hint of darkness all
+about me, with black walls looming up on all sides. It was as though I
+stood in two worlds at once, transfixed between<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> night and day. Then the
+darkness went away, the sunlight brightened. I looked around, and found
+Selda watching me curiously, a little alarmed.</p>
+
+<p>"What happened, Baret?" she asked, puzzled. I shook my head in
+bewilderment.</p>
+
+<p>"I seemed to stumble&mdash;" I said. There was nothing underfoot but the soft
+sand, and where I had flung my hand against a sort of railing, there was
+nothing either. We went back to the airship in silence, both of us
+confused.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>After that, with increasing frequency, there would come interruptions,
+like iron bars striking dark, jagged holes in the tissue of life. From
+time to time I heard inexplicable noises&mdash;the whirring of motors, the
+skid-skid of tires on invisible streets, the rumble of carts around
+corners of a world where there were no carts. Again and again those
+moments of confusion would come over me, when I seemed to be looking
+into two worlds at once, one superimposed upon the other, one bright,
+the other dark with faint points of light in the distance. Once, walking
+along the corridor beyond my room in Richmond, I collided with a man.
+For a moment the corridor faded completely. I stood on a street with
+dark houses about me. Overhead was the glow of a street-lamp,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> and a
+milk-cart was just rattling away around a corner. A man with a
+frightened face stood before me, his hat on the pavement, his eyes
+staring. We looked at each other in astonishment. I started to speak.
+Then he reached for his hat quickly, and brushed by me, muttering close
+to my ear.</p>
+
+<p>"For God's sake, look where you're going...."</p>
+
+<p>I stood in the corridor again, staring. Down the corridor, coming toward
+me, was a single figure&mdash;Selda. Behind me there was nobody. I went to
+meet Selda, dazed and uneasy. I could still hear, close to my ear, an
+echo of that muffled, hoarse voice that I had never heard before.</p>
+
+<p>That was two days before the end. We were leaving the city on that final
+bright morning, when a representative of the Bureau stopped us. I looked
+at him inquiringly.</p>
+
+<p>"I have come to tell you, Baret," he said, "that your departure is
+scheduled for this evening." I drew back, startled, and looked at Selda.</p>
+
+<p>"My departure?" I repeated in a low voice, hardly understanding. "So
+soon?" I had forgotten that one day I should have to leave.</p>
+
+<p>"It has been arranged," he said impersonally.</p>
+
+<p>We bowed slightly to each<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> other, and he went away. Selda and I stepped
+aboard our ship in silence.</p>
+
+<p>That time we flew up the river until we came to the foothills of the
+mountains in the north. We landed in a little clearing by the river at
+the foot of a waterfall hundreds of feet high, towering over us. The
+forest stood about us on all sides, coming down to the river's brim on
+the opposite bank and meeting it not far from us on the near bank. The
+precipice, covered with moss and small bushes, stood above us.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>We sat a long while in silence, before I said bitterly:</p>
+
+<p>"So I must go."</p>
+
+<p>She didn't look at me, but answered quietly, "Yes, you must go."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to go," I cried, "I want to stay here!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why?" she asked me, averting her face.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you know?" I said swiftly. "Haven't you understood long ago that
+I love you?" She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Love is something that we don't know here&mdash;not until we have been
+married and lived with our men. Sometimes not then." But she looked at
+me, and I thought there were tears in her eyes. Suddenly the impulse I
+had been resisting ever since the morning on the mountain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> became
+insupportable, and I caught her in my arms almost roughly. Her face was
+close to mine, and she closed her eyes. I kissed her, forgetting
+everything but the knowledge that I had stumbled upon the sort of love
+that doesn't pass away, no matter how long a man lives.</p>
+
+<p>After a while, though, she drew away as if she resisted not my desire,
+but her own.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;" she said in a low voice, "no...."</p>
+
+<p>"But Selda!" I stammered, "I love you&mdash;I want to marry you." She shook
+her head.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said again, "didn't you understand? I am scheduled to marry
+Edvar."</p>
+
+<p>At first I didn't know what she meant.</p>
+
+<p>"Scheduled?" I repeated dully. "I don't understand."</p>
+
+<p>"It has been arranged for years. Don't you remember what Edvar told you
+about our marriages here, the very first day you came? I was destined to
+marry Edvar long before any of us were born, before our parents, even,
+were born. It's the way they order our lives."</p>
+
+<p>"But I love you," I cried in amazement. "And you love me, too. I know
+you love me."</p>
+
+<p>"That means nothing here," she said. "It happens sometimes. One has to
+accept it. Nothing can be done. We live according to the machinery of
+the world.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> Everything is known and predetermined."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Suddenly, in the midst of what she was saying, close behind me there
+sounded even above the roaring of the waterfall a raucous noise like the
+hooting of a taxi horn. It was followed by a shrieking of brakes, and a
+hoarse voice near by shouted something angry and profane. A rush of air
+swept by me, and I heard faintly the sound of a motor moving away, with
+a grinding of gears. I looked at Selda.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you hear that?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded, with wide, frightened eyes. "Yes. It's not the first time."
+Suddenly she rose, frowning, as if with pain. "Come," she added, "now we
+must go back."</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing else to do. We went back silently to the airship, and
+turned its nose toward the city.</p>
+
+<p>But when I left her at her apartment, promising to see her later, I had
+one last hope in my mind. I went to the Bureau.</p>
+
+<p>The Bureau was a vast system of halls and offices, occupying two floors
+of the great building. I was sent from one automatic device to
+another&mdash;there were no human clerks&mdash;in search of the representative who
+had spoken to me before. Finally I found him in his apartment,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> down the
+corridor only a hundred feet or so from my own. He was pouring over a
+metal sheet on his table, where innumerable shifting figures were thrown
+by some hidden machine, and he was calculating with a set of hundreds of
+buttons along its edges. He spoke to me without pausing or looking up,
+and throughout my interview he continued with his figuring as if it had
+been entirely automatic&mdash;as perhaps it was.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Baret?" he said I felt like a small child before the
+principal of the school.</p>
+
+<p>"I have come to ask you whether it is necessary for me to go," I
+answered. He nodded slightly, never looking up.</p>
+
+<p>"It is necessary," he said. "Your visit was pre-arranged and definite."
+I made a gesture of remonstrance.</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't want to go," I insisted. "I like this place, and I am
+willing to fall into its life if I can remain under any conditions."</p>
+
+<p>"It is impossible," he objected angrily.</p>
+
+<p>"I have never been told why or how I came here. You said you would tell
+me that."</p>
+
+<p>"I have never been told myself. It is a matter known to the men who
+handled it."</p>
+
+<p>"If I went to them, surely they could find some way to let me stay?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No," he said coldly, "the thing was as definite as every event that
+takes place here. We do not let things happen haphazardly. We do not
+alter what has been arranged. And even if it were possible to let you
+stay&mdash;which I am inclined to doubt&mdash;they would not permit it."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"Why not?" I asked dully.</p>
+
+<p>"Because there is no place for you. Our social system has been planned
+for hundreds of years ahead. Every individual of today and every
+individual of the next six generations has his definite place, his
+program, his work to do. There is no place for you. It is impossible to
+fit you in, for you have no work, no training, no need that you can
+fill. You have no woman, and there are no women for your children or
+your children's children. You are unnecessary. To fit you in, one would
+have to disrupt the whole system for generations ahead. It is
+impossible."</p>
+
+<p>I thought a moment, hopelessly.</p>
+
+<p>"If I made a place?" I suggested. "Suppose I took someone else's place?"
+He smiled, a faint, cold smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Murder? It is impossible. You are always under the control of the
+Bureau in some way, whether you are aware of it or not."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I turned away, a little dazed. The whole thing was inevitable and clear
+as he put it. I knew there was nothing to be done.</p>
+
+<p>I left his apartment, and went down the corridor to the landing stage.
+No one interfered with my movements, and my commands were not
+questioned. I ordered a plane, and gave my name to the girl in charge.</p>
+
+<p>"Your destination?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>I said, "I am only going for pleasure."</p>
+
+<p>"Your return?"</p>
+
+<p>"Expect me in an hour."</p>
+
+<p>I had watched Selda pilot the planes for so many weeks that I was
+familiar with the controls. I rose swiftly, circled the building, and
+headed north toward the mountains. I hadn't the courage to see Selda
+again. It was only a little while before I came to the place by the
+river where we had spent the morning. I slowed down, and flew over it,
+just above the waterfall.</p>
+
+<p>There was a landing-spot by the river just beyond the top of the fall. I
+came to rest there, and left the machine.</p>
+
+<p>I stood looking at the river for a moment. I don't remember that any
+thoughts or emotions came to my mind. I simply stood there, a little
+dazed, and very quiet, with a vague picture of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> Selda before my eyes. It
+was a dream-like moment.</p>
+
+<p>Then I slipped over the river's bank, into the water, and the swift
+current, catching me up and whirling me around dizzily, carried me
+toward the edge of the waterfall.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="And_So_to_Work" id="And_So_to_Work"></a>And So to Work</h3>
+
+<p>I glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was five minutes to eight: time
+to leave, if I was to get a decent breakfast before I went to the
+office. I found an old hat in the closet and put it on. It would do
+until I had time to buy another.</p>
+
+<p>Last night&mdash;and this morning. Last night, after supper, I had dropped by
+the Club for a drink. And met Melbourne. This morning I woke in the
+water of the lake, and came home, and dressed. And went to work. Twelve
+hours&mdash;and in that time I had lived two months. I had fallen in love,
+and died. Now I must go to work.</p>
+
+<p>As I left the apartment, and turned west away from the Drive, toward the
+street cars, I was whistling over and over a brief snatch of music. Was
+it Grieg? Or some composer never heard on earth?</p>
+
+<p>There were people on the street now. They went by with frowning, intent
+faces&mdash;on their way to work. And cars rolling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> by, pausing at the cross
+streets with little squealings of brakes.</p>
+
+<p>Everything was so simple now. I went over it all as I waited for the
+street car, and as I rode down town. It was strange that Melbourne had
+never foreseen that one possibility among so many.</p>
+
+<p>We had sat down in our chairs, and then the adventure had begun. I
+had felt the sensation of moving about, of going from place to place.
+When I was a child I used to have dreams of walking about  the
+house and about the streets. I would wake up on the stairs, or at the
+door&mdash;sleep-walking. Reflexes did it. I had left the chair, under the
+influence of the story in the Chamber of Life, and gone out of the room.
+I remembered now all those brief moments, when I had seemed poised on
+the brink of the real world&mdash;the stumbling against some hard object, the
+face under the street-lamp, the taxi, the voices. I had been going
+through the dark streets, with closed eyes, going toward the
+Drive&mdash;sleep-walking. And when I slipped over the bank of the river, in
+the dream, and down into the water&mdash;in reality I had gone over the side
+of the Drive, and down into the cold lake.</p>
+
+<p>It had been dawn.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I left the car, and walked down the street, lost in the midst of the
+crowds hurrying about me. It was all over, gone like one of those old
+dreams of my childhood. I could never forget it&mdash;never forget Selda&mdash;but
+it was gone. It had never existed. It had been cruel of Melbourne, cruel
+and ironic, to put Selda in the dream. But perhaps he had never realized
+that it would last over into reality.</p>
+
+<p>I had no hope of seeing her again, even in the Chamber. I knew I could
+never find Melbourne's home: I had paid no attention to the way the
+taxi-driver took. And I wasn't very much interested now. It was only a
+dream. I had lost the only girl I had ever loved, in a dream.</p>
+
+<p>I pushed open the door of the Norfolk Lunch. It was late&mdash;I had only a
+little while for breakfast. I sat down at one of the tables, and spoke
+to the waiter in much the usual manner.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello, Joe. I'm in a hurry&mdash;bring me bacon and eggs, as usual."</p>
+
+<p>"Coffee, Mr. Barrett?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, coffee too. And hurry it up."</p>
+
+<p>It wouldn't do to be late at the office, where I, too, was a maker of
+sometimes cruel dreams.</p>
+
+<h4>THE END</h4>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Chamber of Life, by Green Peyton Wertenbaker
+
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@@ -0,0 +1,1754 @@
+Project Gutenberg's The Chamber of Life, by Green Peyton Wertenbaker
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Chamber of Life
+
+Author: Green Peyton Wertenbaker
+
+Illustrator: Austin Briggs
+
+Release Date: June 21, 2008 [EBook #25862]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHAMBER OF LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Annie McGuire and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
++-------------------------------------------------------+
+|This etext was produced from Amazing Stories July 1962,|
+|a reprint from Amazing Stories October 1929. Extensive |
+|research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.    |
+|copyright on this publication was renewed.             |
++-------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+  A Classic Reprint from AMAZING STORIES, October, 1929
+
+  Illustrated by BRIGGS
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+  The CHAMBER of LIFE
+
+  By G. PEYTON WERTENBAKER
+
+  _Copyright 1929 by E. P. Inc._
+
+
+
+
+A Strange Awakening
+
+
+My first sensation was one of sudden and intense cold--a chill that shot
+through my body and engulfed it like a charge of electricity. For a
+moment I was conscious of nothing else. Then I knew that I was sinking
+in cold water, and that I was fighting instinctively against the need to
+gasp and breathe fresh air. I kicked weakly and convulsively. I opened
+my eyes, and squeezed them as the bright green water stung them. Then I
+hung for an instant as if suspended over the depths, and began to rise.
+It seemed hours before I shot up into the open air again, and was
+drinking it deeply and thankfully into my tortured lungs. The sun
+touched my head warmly like the hand of a benign god.
+
+Floating gently, I lay there for a long while before I even looked about
+me. There was a vague confusion in my head, as if I had just awakened
+from a long sleep. Some memory seemed to be fading away, something I
+could still feel but couldn't understand. Then it was gone, and I was
+alone and empty, riding on the water.
+
+I glanced about, puzzled. Only a few yards away rose the gray stone side
+of the embankment, with its low parapet, and behind that the Drive.
+There was no one in sight--not even a car--and the open windows of the
+apartment houses across the Drive seemed very quiet. People slept behind
+them.
+
+It was only a little after dawn. The sun, blazing and tinted with pink,
+had hardly risen from the horizon. The lake was still lined with dark
+shadows behind glittering ridges of morning sunlight, and a cool breeze
+played across my face, coming in from the east. Over the city, the sound
+of a street car rumbling into motion, rising and dying away, was like
+the crowing of a rooster in the country.
+
+I shivered, and began to swim. A few strokes brought me to the
+embankment, and I clambered up, almost freezing as I left the water. I
+was fully clothed, but without a hat. Perhaps I had lost it in the lake.
+I stood there, dripping and chill, and suddenly I realized that I had
+just waked up in the water. I had no recollection of falling in, nor
+even of being there. I could remember nothing of the previous night.
+
+A glance along the Drive told me where I was, at the corner of
+Fifty-third street. My apartment was only a few blocks away. Had I been
+walking in my sleep? My mind was a blank, with turbulent, dim
+impressions moving confusedly under the surface.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Trembling in the chill air, I started up the Drive. I must go home and
+change at once. Something came back to me--a memory of talking to some
+friends at the Club. But was that last night? Or months ago? It was as
+though I had slept for months. We had had a few drinks--could I have
+been drunk, and fallen into the lake on my way home? But I never took
+more than two or three drinks. Something had happened.
+
+Then I remembered the stranger. We had all been sitting about the
+lounge, talking of something. What had we been discussing? Franklin had
+mentioned Einstein's new theory--we had played with that for a while,
+none of us with the least idea what it was about. Then the conversation
+had shifted slowly from one topic to another, all having to do with
+scientific discoveries.
+
+Somewhere in the midst of it, Barclay had come in. He brought with him a
+guest--a straight, fine-looking man with a military carriage, about
+fifty years old. Barclay had introduced him as Mr. Melbourne. He spoke
+with a slight southern accent.
+
+In some way Melbourne and I gravitated into a corner. We went on with
+the conversation while the others left it. They drifted into politics,
+drawing together about the table where the whisky stood, leaving us
+alone.
+
+Melbourne had been a fascinating man to talk to. He discussed topics
+ranging from theories of matter to the early Cretan culture, and related
+them all to one dominant scientific thread. He spoke like a man of wide
+knowledge and experience.... As I walked up the Drive, bits of his
+conversation came disjointedly back to me with the clarity and
+significance of sentences from Spengler.
+
+An early-morning taxi went by slowly as I crossed the Drive to my
+apartment. The driver stopped a moment, and looked at me in
+astonishment.
+
+"What's the matter, buddy," he said, "you look all wet. Fall in the
+lake?" I smiled, embarrassed.
+
+"Looks that way, doesn't it?" I answered.
+
+"Can I take you anywhere?"
+
+"No," I said, "I live here." He grinned, and started off again.
+
+"Wish I'd been in on that party!" he called back, as he drove away.
+
+I frowned, once more with that puzzled feeling, and went in.
+
+
+
+
+Melbourne's Story
+
+
+Glimpses of last night came back to me and pieced themselves together
+slowly while I undressed and drew the water for my bath.
+
+Melbourne had been interested to know that I worked for Bausch, the
+motion picture producer.
+
+"Perhaps you could be of aid to me some time," he said thoughtfully.
+
+"In what way, Mr. Melbourne?" I asked him.
+
+"I can talk to you about that later," he replied cryptically. "Tell me
+about your work."
+
+So I told him the conception I had of the motion pictures to be made in
+the future. He listened with keen interest.
+
+"I visualize a production going beyond anything done today," I said,
+"and yet one that would be possible now, if there were someone capable
+of creating it. A picture with sound and color, reproducing faithfully
+the ordinary life about us, its tints and voices, even the noises of the
+city--or traffic passing in the street and newsboys crying the scores of
+the afternoon games--vividly and naturally. My picture would be so
+carefully constructed that the projector could be stopped at any moment
+and the screen would show a scene as harmonious in design and
+composition and coloring, and as powerful in feeling, as a painting by
+Rockwell Kent." After a pause I added, "And I'd give almost anything if
+I could do it myself."
+
+Melbourne looked at me sympathetically, reflectively.
+
+"It might be possible," he said after a time.
+
+"What do you mean, Mr. Melbourne?" He puffed at a cigar, and considered.
+
+"It's not something I could explain to you off-hand," he said. "It's
+strange and it's new. It needs preparation."
+
+"I'm ready to listen," I said with eager interest. He smiled.
+
+"Perhaps I had better tell you a little of my life."
+
+"Go on," I answered briefly.
+
+"I had ideas much like yours when I was a boy," he began his story. "In
+high school and college I had believed myself an artist. I was a good
+musician, and I dabbled with painting and literature. I wanted to come
+back for post-graduate work, though, and something attracted me to
+science. I had put off studying mathematics until my graduating year,
+only to find that it fascinated me. And I was curious about physics.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"While I was studying for my Master's degree and my Doctorate, I felt
+the need of some interest to merge all the divergent sides of my nature.
+Something that would give me a chance to be both the artist and the man
+of science. That was a quarter of a century ago. The motion picture and
+the phonograph were just coming into the public eye. They seemed to
+supply just the field for which I felt a need.
+
+"I had much the same idea as yourself, except that there were no
+discoveries to back it--no color photography, no method for harmonizing
+sound and sight. Indeed, neither the screen nor the phonograph had come
+to be regarded yet as essentially more than a toy. But, like yourself,
+I had vision. And enthusiasm. And an intense desire to create.
+
+"After I had taken my degrees, I went to work with almost abnormal
+intensity. With sufficient income to live as I desired, I fitted up my
+laboratory and concentrated on the thing I wanted to do. I spent years
+at it. I gave my youth--or, at least, the best of my youth--to that
+labor. Long before sound and color pictures were perfected commercially,
+I had developed similar processes for myself. But they were not what I
+wanted. The real thing was beyond my grasp, and I couldn't see how to
+attain it.
+
+"I worked feverishly. I think I must have worked myself into a sort of
+frenzy, a sort of madness. I never mingled with people, and I became
+bitter and despondent. One day my nerves broke down. I smashed
+everything in my laboratory, all my models, all my apparatus, and I
+burned the plans and papers I had labored over for years.
+
+"My physician told me that I must rest and recuperate. He told me I must
+interest myself again in daily life, in people and inanimate things. So
+I went away. For the next few years I traveled. I tore myself away from
+everything scientific and plunged into the business of living. Almost
+overnight I became an adventurer, tasting sensations with the same
+ardor I had once given to my work. I went back to art, to painting and
+literature and music. I was a connoisseur of wines and of foods and of
+women. I was an experimenter with life.
+
+"Little by little, though, the zest of that passed away. I grew tired of
+my dilettantism. And eventually I found that, even while I had been
+moving about the world and experiencing its curious values, my mind had
+been grappling quietly, subconsciously, with my old problem. The change
+in my life had given me the wider outlook, the keener understanding
+necessary to the accomplishment of my task. In the end, I went back to
+it again with renewed vigor. With greater power, too, and greater
+sanity."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Melbourne paused here. Sensing his need, I brought him a highball, and
+one for myself. He tasted it with a quizzical expression.
+
+"They call this whisky nowadays!" he observed absently, with quiet
+irony. I wanted to hear the rest of his account.
+
+"Go on with your story, sir," I begged him.
+
+"The rest is simple enough--but it's the meat of the narrative. You see,
+I had to revise the way I was going about my work, and I went at it at a
+new angle. By this time wireless telegraphy was being widely developed,
+and there were many features of it that appealed to me. With the
+knowledge I had gained during my first feverish years of experiment,
+however, I was able to go far beyond what has been done in recent times
+with radio.
+
+"I used a system differing in many respects from that of the commercial
+radio. We haven't time now to go into all that--I can tell you later,
+and it involves much that is highly technical and still secret. It is
+sufficient if I explain that my object was to evolve and fuse methods
+for doing with each of the senses what radio does with sound.
+Telephotography was the simplest problem--the others required an almost
+superhuman amount of labor.
+
+"But my biggest job was to combine them. And, to do that, I had to use
+knowledge I had gained not only in the laboratory but in my wanderings
+about the earth--not only in the colleges and salons of Europe and
+America, but in the bazaars and temples of India, Egypt, China. I had to
+unite the lore of ancient and modern civilizations, and I created a new
+factor in electrical science. I suppose the simplest and most
+intelligible name for it would be mental telepathy. But it is more than
+that, and basically it is as simple and material as your own motion
+pictures."
+
+I think Melbourne would have gone on and told me more about his
+discoveries. At that moment, however, he paused to reflect, and we
+looked up to find the others leaving. The bottle of Scotch was empty.
+
+"Ready, Melbourne?" Barclay called. We rose.
+
+"I didn't realize it was so late," Melbourne answered. "Mr. Barrett and
+I have found each other most interesting."
+
+We all found our hats and went out. Melbourne and Barclay, each
+apologizing for having neglected the other, said good-bye. Barclay was
+tired and wanted to go to bed. He went off with the others, but
+Melbourne turned my way.
+
+"If you're not too weary of my company," he said, "I'll go with you a
+little way."
+
+"You know I'm not," I answered. "I've never been so interested in
+anything before. It sounds like a chapter from Wells, or Jules Verne."
+
+He smiled, with a little shake of his head, and we walked on for awhile
+in silence toward the lake....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All this came back to me swiftly and with an effect of incoherence, much
+as a dream moves, during the few moments when I was getting ready for my
+bath. I laid out my shaving things, and put a record on the Victrola. I
+have never quite conquered my need for music while I bathe and dress. I
+think the record was a Grieg nocturne--something cool and quiet, with a
+touch of acutely sweet pain and melancholy.
+
+Then I happened to glance at a mirror for the first time. I stood amazed
+and transfixed. Overnight I had grown a beard such as wanderers bring
+back with them from the wilderness. Under the beard, my face seemed to
+have altered somehow, to have changed in some peculiar way. Physically
+it appeared younger, with an expression of calm and repose such as I had
+never before seen on a man's face. But the eyes were wise and old, as
+if--overnight!--the mind behind them had learned the knowledge of all
+time.
+
+Or was it overnight? I could not lose that feeling that time had passed
+by since my last contact with ordinary life. It was as though, somewhere
+and somehow, I had lived for weeks or months in some new plane, and
+forgotten it. I felt richer and older than I had once felt, and the
+things I had been remembering seemed remote.
+
+At that moment, a chance strain from the machine in my living room
+brought back a whole new group of vivid impressions, strange and yet in
+a sense more familiar than my memories of Melbourne. They opened up to
+me a different life in which I seemed to have participated by chance,
+and a life which had, at first sight, no point of contact with the
+reality to which I had returned....
+
+
+
+
+A Chance Strain from Grieg
+
+
+I recalled waking up in another place, on a long slope of green hill
+that overlooked a valley. It was dawn again. The sun was just rising
+over the crest of the hill behind me, and it threw long shadows across
+the grass from the tall, slender trees along the summit. Down in the
+valley a broad, clean river of clear water followed the curve of the
+hill until it disappeared from sight. There were other hills beyond the
+river, all with the same long, simple slope of grass; and, beyond the
+hills, there were the tops of blue mountains, swathed in white morning
+mist.
+
+It was a strange place. Its strangeness consisted in a subtle appearance
+of order and care, as though a gardener or an army of gardeners had
+arranged and tended the whole vast sweep of landscape for years. It was
+uncultivated and deserted as waste land, but as well trimmed, in spite
+of its spaciousness, as a lawn.
+
+The morning was very warm. I was not conscious of any chill in the air.
+I was clothed only in short trousers, such as athletes wear, and a short
+belted tunic without sleeves and loose--both of them indescribably soft
+and comfortable.
+
+I was aware of the strangeness of my awakening, but I seemed to have no
+definite recollection of falling asleep. I felt that I had come there
+during my sleep under unusual circumstances and from a very different
+life, but the thought didn't disturb me or trouble my mind in any way.
+My chief emotion was a curious feeling of expectancy. I knew that I was
+about to have some new and curious experience, something not trivial,
+and I was eager to meet it.
+
+I lay there for awhile, drinking in the beauty of the morning, and
+breathing an air of miraculous purity and freshness. Finally I stood up,
+light and conscious of a sudden grace, aware for the first time, in its
+departure, of the awkwardness and weight which ordinarily attend our
+movements on earth. It was as if some of the earth's gravity had been
+lost.
+
+For a while I examined the valley, but I saw no sign of life there. Then
+I turned and went slowly up the hill, the sunlight falling warmly on my
+body, and my feet sinking sensuously in the deep grass.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I came to the crest and looked over, I saw another valley before
+me, deeper than the first. The hill rolled away, down and down for
+miles, to a long, wide plain. More hills rose from the plain on every
+side, as simply as if they had been built there by the hand of some
+gigantic child playing in a wilderness of sand. And the river, coming
+around the base of the hill on which I was standing, but several miles
+away, swept out upon a great aqueduct of stone, hundreds of feet high,
+which crossed the plain through its very center, a straight line of
+breath-taking beauty, and disappeared far away into the pass between two
+mountains. The whole scene was too perfect to be wholly natural.
+
+At the center of the plain stood a tall, white building. Even in the
+distance from which I viewed it, it looked massive--larger than any
+skyscraper I had ever seen. But it was delicately and intricately
+designed, terraced much as most modern office buildings in New York are
+terraced, but more elaborately. Its base stood about the aqueduct, which
+passed through it, and it swept up magnificently to a slender peak
+almost level with the crest of the hill where I was standing. It was the
+only building in sight.
+
+I don't know how long I stood there, admiring the clean sweep and
+vastness of the scene, before I saw something rise sharply, with a
+flashing of bright wings, from some hidden courtyard or terrace of the
+building. It was followed closely by another and then another, like a
+flight of birds. They shot up swiftly, circled once or twice, and moved
+away in different directions, straight and purposeful. One of them came
+toward my hill.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was only a few moments before the thing sped up to me and swooped
+down as I waved my arms. It was, of course, a machine, slender and long,
+with wide arching wings. It seemed almost light enough to float. It had
+a deck, shielded from the wind by a shimmering transparent thing like a
+thin wire screen, and under the deck a cabin made, it seemed, of glass.
+A man and a woman stood on the deck, the woman handling the controls.
+They were both dressed much like myself.
+
+The machine came to rest on the hill near me. I stepped forward, and the
+man leaped down to meet me. His first greeting was curious.
+
+"So you _are_ here," he said. His voice was small but cool, penetrating
+and metallic. I thought of fine steel wires. And, when I replied, my own
+voice had something of the same quality.
+
+"Were you expecting me?" I said. He nodded, shaking my hand briefly and
+quietly.
+
+"We know all about you," he answered. I was pleased--it made things
+simpler--but I wanted to ask him who I was. I didn't remember anything
+up to the moment of my awakening on the other side of the hill. Instead,
+I asked him:
+
+"Shall I go aboard?" He nodded again, and waved his hand toward the
+ladder. I went aboard lithely, and he followed. The girl and I glanced
+at each other; I was surprised and rather disturbed by her beauty and
+cleanness of body. I turned to the man, a little embarrassed, as she
+manipulated some controls and set the ship in motion again.
+
+"You'll have to forgive me," I said. "Something has happened, and I
+don't know things. I've completely lost my memory."
+
+They understood at once.
+
+"Your name is Baret." He pronounced it oddly. "I am Edvar, and this girl
+is Selda." We all looked at each other intently, and I went on
+hesitantly.
+
+"I don't know where I am. Can you tell me something about myself?" Edvar
+shook his head.
+
+"Only this," he said, "that we were notified of your presence and your
+name. This city is Richmond." I glanced about quickly.
+
+"Richmond!" I exclaimed. "Virginia?" But he shook his head.
+
+"I don't understand you," he replied.
+
+I went on, with a puzzled frown. "It has changed...." Both of them
+looked at me curiously.
+
+"How has it changed, Baret?" the girl, Selda, asked me. I glanced at her
+absently and closed my eyes.
+
+"Why ... I don't know," I stammered, "I don't remember." For a few
+moments there was silence, except for the shouting of the wind past our
+ship. Then Selda asked me another question.
+
+"Where are you from?" I shook my head helplessly, and answered again, "I
+don't know--I don't remember."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A moment later we dipped into the shadow of the building, which they
+called Richmond. We slipped by a succession of vast and intricate
+facades until we came to a court-like terrace, hundreds of feet above
+the ground and sheltered on three sides by walls that leaped up toward
+the sky for hundreds of feet more. The effect of height was dizzying and
+magnificent.
+
+Selda brought the ship to a quick and graceful landing. I found that we
+were in a large paved court like a public square, facing the east and
+the sun, which bathed it in cool bright light. It was still early in the
+morning. Innumerable windows looked down upon us, and a number of
+doorways led into the building on all sides. From one of these a girl
+stepped forward. Edvar spoke to her, evidently reporting himself and
+Selda. The girl pushed several buttons on a small cabinet which hung
+from her shoulder. It rang, low and silvery, twice. Then she pointed to
+me.
+
+"Who is that?" she asked.
+
+"His name is Baret," Edvar told her. "I was sent to meet him."
+
+"But where is he from? He is not registered."
+
+"We don't know. It's an unusual circumstance," he explained, while the
+girl examined us all carefully. "Very well," she said finally, "you must
+attend him until he is registered. I'll notify Odom." Edvar nodded, and
+we turned away.
+
+Glancing back as we crossed the court, I saw the ship descending
+noiselessly, on the square of pavement where it had landed, into the
+depths of the building, while the girl made other gestures with her
+little cabinet. Then we passed through a doorway into the subdued glow
+of artificial lighting.
+
+"Why was she so worried?" I asked Edvar. "I don't understand anything,
+you know."
+
+"You were not registered," he said. "We are all registered, of course,
+in our own cities. The authorities know where to find us at any moment
+of the day during our routine. If we leave the city, or depart from our
+usual program, naturally we note down where we are going, registering
+ourselves upon our departure and upon our return. If we visit another
+city, our arrival there is expected and reported here, as well as our
+departure."
+
+"Is all that necessary?" I asked him. "Is there a war, perhaps?"
+
+"No," he said, "it's customary. It prevents confusion. Everything we do
+is recorded. This conversation, for instance, is being recorded in the
+telepathic laboratory at this moment--each of us has a record there.
+They are open to the public at any time. It makes dishonor impossible."
+
+We paused at a doorway, and Edvar spoke a word. It opened noiselessly
+and we went into his apartment.
+
+"We are assigned to you this morning," Edvar said. "We are at your
+service."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+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.
+
+"So would I," she admitted. Then, in a low voice, she added, "But one
+can't. One has to follow one's program."
+
+We returned to the airship, raid rose into the cool, thin air. I stood
+behind her on the way back, watching her slender body as she guided the
+plane. Once in a while she would turn her head and look up at me over
+her shoulder, then quickly look away again.
+
+"Why is it," I asked her as we passed over the valleys and the river on
+our way home, "why is it that these hills have such a cultivated
+look--as though they had been laid out?" She glanced back, and smiled.
+
+"They _have_ been laid out," she said. "The hills, and the rivers, and
+the tallest mountains have all been constructed by our landscape artists
+in order to achieve their various effects. Even the line of the sea has
+been determined and arranged by the artists."
+
+"But why?" I said. "Wasn't it a frightful waste of energy?"
+
+"It didn't seem so to us," she answered. "We had no further need to
+cultivate the land except in small patches, when we learned the secret
+of artificial food. And we wanted to have perfect beauty about us. So we
+remodeled the outlines of the earth, and eliminated the insects and the
+harmful animals and the weeds. We made the land clean and fine as it had
+never been before."
+
+"It must have been a terrific labor."
+
+"It pleased us. Our instinct is to arrange and remodel things, to order
+our life so that we know what it is and what it will always be." She
+paused for a moment, and added in a low voice, "One is necessarily a
+determinist here."
+
+We said no more until our arrival in Richmond.
+
+It is not my purpose to detail here all that happened during the time I
+spent on that world. Most of it had to do with Selda, and our daily
+expeditions about the world. This is not, after all, a love story, but
+the account of a very strange experience; and, too, none of it was real.
+
+During my last week, a series of strange moods and happenings
+complicated my life. One day, after a visit to the sea with Selda, we
+were walking back to our plane across the sand. Without any warning,
+surrounded by the brilliant morning sunlight and the miles of sea and
+beach, I struck my knee against something hard and immovable, and,
+flinging out my hand to catch myself from falling, I clung to a hard
+surface like an iron railing. For a moment I was stunned and confused.
+The sunlight seemed to fade, and there was a vague hint of darkness all
+about me, with black walls looming up on all sides. It was as though I
+stood in two worlds at once, transfixed between night and day. Then the
+darkness went away, the sunlight brightened. I looked around, and found
+Selda watching me curiously, a little alarmed.
+
+"What happened, Baret?" she asked, puzzled. I shook my head in
+bewilderment.
+
+"I seemed to stumble--" I said. There was nothing underfoot but the soft
+sand, and where I had flung my hand against a sort of railing, there was
+nothing either. We went back to the airship in silence, both of us
+confused.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After that, with increasing frequency, there would come interruptions,
+like iron bars striking dark, jagged holes in the tissue of life. From
+time to time I heard inexplicable noises--the whirring of motors, the
+skid-skid of tires on invisible streets, the rumble of carts around
+corners of a world where there were no carts. Again and again those
+moments of confusion would come over me, when I seemed to be looking
+into two worlds at once, one superimposed upon the other, one bright,
+the other dark with faint points of light in the distance. Once, walking
+along the corridor beyond my room in Richmond, I collided with a man.
+For a moment the corridor faded completely. I stood on a street with
+dark houses about me. Overhead was the glow of a street-lamp, and a
+milk-cart was just rattling away around a corner. A man with a
+frightened face stood before me, his hat on the pavement, his eyes
+staring. We looked at each other in astonishment. I started to speak.
+Then he reached for his hat quickly, and brushed by me, muttering close
+to my ear.
+
+"For God's sake, look where you're going...."
+
+I stood in the corridor again, staring. Down the corridor, coming toward
+me, was a single figure--Selda. Behind me there was nobody. I went to
+meet Selda, dazed and uneasy. I could still hear, close to my ear, an
+echo of that muffled, hoarse voice that I had never heard before.
+
+That was two days before the end. We were leaving the city on that final
+bright morning, when a representative of the Bureau stopped us. I looked
+at him inquiringly.
+
+"I have come to tell you, Baret," he said, "that your departure is
+scheduled for this evening." I drew back, startled, and looked at Selda.
+
+"My departure?" I repeated in a low voice, hardly understanding. "So
+soon?" I had forgotten that one day I should have to leave.
+
+"It has been arranged," he said impersonally.
+
+We bowed slightly to each other, and he went away. Selda and I stepped
+aboard our ship in silence.
+
+That time we flew up the river until we came to the foothills of the
+mountains in the north. We landed in a little clearing by the river at
+the foot of a waterfall hundreds of feet high, towering over us. The
+forest stood about us on all sides, coming down to the river's brim on
+the opposite bank and meeting it not far from us on the near bank. The
+precipice, covered with moss and small bushes, stood above us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We sat a long while in silence, before I said bitterly:
+
+"So I must go."
+
+She didn't look at me, but answered quietly, "Yes, you must go."
+
+"I don't want to go," I cried, "I want to stay here!"
+
+"Why?" she asked me, averting her face.
+
+"Don't you know?" I said swiftly. "Haven't you understood long ago that
+I love you?" She shook her head.
+
+"Love is something that we don't know here--not until we have been
+married and lived with our men. Sometimes not then." But she looked at
+me, and I thought there were tears in her eyes. Suddenly the impulse I
+had been resisting ever since the morning on the mountain became
+insupportable, and I caught her in my arms almost roughly. Her face was
+close to mine, and she closed her eyes. I kissed her, forgetting
+everything but the knowledge that I had stumbled upon the sort of love
+that doesn't pass away, no matter how long a man lives.
+
+After a while, though, she drew away as if she resisted not my desire,
+but her own.
+
+"No--" she said in a low voice, "no...."
+
+"But Selda!" I stammered, "I love you--I want to marry you." She shook
+her head.
+
+"No," she said again, "didn't you understand? I am scheduled to marry
+Edvar."
+
+At first I didn't know what she meant.
+
+"Scheduled?" I repeated dully. "I don't understand."
+
+"It has been arranged for years. Don't you remember what Edvar told you
+about our marriages here, the very first day you came? I was destined to
+marry Edvar long before any of us were born, before our parents, even,
+were born. It's the way they order our lives."
+
+"But I love you," I cried in amazement. "And you love me, too. I know
+you love me."
+
+"That means nothing here," she said. "It happens sometimes. One has to
+accept it. Nothing can be done. We live according to the machinery of
+the world. Everything is known and predetermined."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Suddenly, in the midst of what she was saying, close behind me there
+sounded even above the roaring of the waterfall a raucous noise like the
+hooting of a taxi horn. It was followed by a shrieking of brakes, and a
+hoarse voice near by shouted something angry and profane. A rush of air
+swept by me, and I heard faintly the sound of a motor moving away, with
+a grinding of gears. I looked at Selda.
+
+"Did you hear that?"
+
+She nodded, with wide, frightened eyes. "Yes. It's not the first time."
+Suddenly she rose, frowning, as if with pain. "Come," she added, "now we
+must go back."
+
+There was nothing else to do. We went back silently to the airship, and
+turned its nose toward the city.
+
+But when I left her at her apartment, promising to see her later, I had
+one last hope in my mind. I went to the Bureau.
+
+The Bureau was a vast system of halls and offices, occupying two floors
+of the great building. I was sent from one automatic device to
+another--there were no human clerks--in search of the representative who
+had spoken to me before. Finally I found him in his apartment, down the
+corridor only a hundred feet or so from my own. He was pouring over a
+metal sheet on his table, where innumerable shifting figures were thrown
+by some hidden machine, and he was calculating with a set of hundreds of
+buttons along its edges. He spoke to me without pausing or looking up,
+and throughout my interview he continued with his figuring as if it had
+been entirely automatic--as perhaps it was.
+
+"What is it, Baret?" he said I felt like a small child before the
+principal of the school.
+
+"I have come to ask you whether it is necessary for me to go," I
+answered. He nodded slightly, never looking up.
+
+"It is necessary," he said. "Your visit was pre-arranged and definite."
+I made a gesture of remonstrance.
+
+"But I don't want to go," I insisted. "I like this place, and I am
+willing to fall into its life if I can remain under any conditions."
+
+"It is impossible," he objected angrily.
+
+"I have never been told why or how I came here. You said you would tell
+me that."
+
+"I have never been told myself. It is a matter known to the men who
+handled it."
+
+"If I went to them, surely they could find some way to let me stay?"
+
+"No," he said coldly, "the thing was as definite as every event that
+takes place here. We do not let things happen haphazardly. We do not
+alter what has been arranged. And even if it were possible to let you
+stay--which I am inclined to doubt--they would not permit it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Why not?" I asked dully.
+
+"Because there is no place for you. Our social system has been planned
+for hundreds of years ahead. Every individual of today and every
+individual of the next six generations has his definite place, his
+program, his work to do. There is no place for you. It is impossible to
+fit you in, for you have no work, no training, no need that you can
+fill. You have no woman, and there are no women for your children or
+your children's children. You are unnecessary. To fit you in, one would
+have to disrupt the whole system for generations ahead. It is
+impossible."
+
+I thought a moment, hopelessly.
+
+"If I made a place?" I suggested. "Suppose I took someone else's place?"
+He smiled, a faint, cold smile.
+
+"Murder? It is impossible. You are always under the control of the
+Bureau in some way, whether you are aware of it or not."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I turned away, a little dazed. The whole thing was inevitable and clear
+as he put it. I knew there was nothing to be done.
+
+I left his apartment, and went down the corridor to the landing stage.
+No one interfered with my movements, and my commands were not
+questioned. I ordered a plane, and gave my name to the girl in charge.
+
+"Your destination?" she asked.
+
+I said, "I am only going for pleasure."
+
+"Your return?"
+
+"Expect me in an hour."
+
+I had watched Selda pilot the planes for so many weeks that I was
+familiar with the controls. I rose swiftly, circled the building, and
+headed north toward the mountains. I hadn't the courage to see Selda
+again. It was only a little while before I came to the place by the
+river where we had spent the morning. I slowed down, and flew over it,
+just above the waterfall.
+
+There was a landing-spot by the river just beyond the top of the fall. I
+came to rest there, and left the machine.
+
+I stood looking at the river for a moment. I don't remember that any
+thoughts or emotions came to my mind. I simply stood there, a little
+dazed, and very quiet, with a vague picture of Selda before my eyes. It
+was a dream-like moment.
+
+Then I slipped over the river's bank, into the water, and the swift
+current, catching me up and whirling me around dizzily, carried me
+toward the edge of the waterfall.
+
+
+
+
+And So to Work
+
+
+I glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was five minutes to eight: time
+to leave, if I was to get a decent breakfast before I went to the
+office. I found an old hat in the closet and put it on. It would do
+until I had time to buy another.
+
+Last night--and this morning. Last night, after supper, I had dropped by
+the Club for a drink. And met Melbourne. This morning I woke in the
+water of the lake, and came home, and dressed. And went to work. Twelve
+hours--and in that time I had lived two months. I had fallen in love,
+and died. Now I must go to work.
+
+As I left the apartment, and turned west away from the Drive, toward the
+street cars, I was whistling over and over a brief snatch of music. Was
+it Grieg? Or some composer never heard on earth?
+
+There were people on the street now. They went by with frowning, intent
+faces--on their way to work. And cars rolling by, pausing at the cross
+streets with little squealings of brakes.
+
+Everything was so simple now. I went over it all as I waited for the
+street car, and as I rode down town. It was strange that Melbourne had
+never foreseen that one possibility among so many.
+
+We had sat down in our chairs, and then the adventure had begun. I
+had felt the sensation of moving about, of going from place to place.
+When I was a child I used to have dreams of walking about the
+house and about the streets. I would wake up on the stairs, or at the
+door--sleep-walking. Reflexes did it. I had left the chair, under the
+influence of the story in the Chamber of Life, and gone out of the room.
+I remembered now all those brief moments, when I had seemed poised on
+the brink of the real world--the stumbling against some hard object, the
+face under the street-lamp, the taxi, the voices. I had been going
+through the dark streets, with closed eyes, going toward the
+Drive--sleep-walking. And when I slipped over the bank of the river, in
+the dream, and down into the water--in reality I had gone over the side
+of the Drive, and down into the cold lake.
+
+It had been dawn.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I left the car, and walked down the street, lost in the midst of the
+crowds hurrying about me. It was all over, gone like one of those old
+dreams of my childhood. I could never forget it--never forget Selda--but
+it was gone. It had never existed. It had been cruel of Melbourne, cruel
+and ironic, to put Selda in the dream. But perhaps he had never realized
+that it would last over into reality.
+
+I had no hope of seeing her again, even in the Chamber. I knew I could
+never find Melbourne's home: I had paid no attention to the way the
+taxi-driver took. And I wasn't very much interested now. It was only a
+dream. I had lost the only girl I had ever loved, in a dream.
+
+I pushed open the door of the Norfolk Lunch. It was late--I had only a
+little while for breakfast. I sat down at one of the tables, and spoke
+to the waiter in much the usual manner.
+
+"Hello, Joe. I'm in a hurry--bring me bacon and eggs, as usual."
+
+"Coffee, Mr. Barrett?"
+
+"Yes, coffee too. And hurry it up."
+
+It wouldn't do to be late at the office, where I, too, was a maker of
+sometimes cruel dreams.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Chamber of Life, by Green Peyton Wertenbaker
+
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