Pygmalions Spectacles | Page 2

you are in
the story, you speak to the shadows, and the shadows reply, and instead
of being on a screen, the story is all about you, and you are in it. Would
that be to make real a dream?"
"How the devil could you do that?"
"How? How? But simply! First my liquid positive, then my magic
spectacles. I photograph the story in a liquid with light-sensitive
chromates. I build up a complex solution--do you see? I add taste
chemically and sound electrically. And when the story is recorded, then
I put the solution in my spectacle--my movie projector. I electrolyze the
solution, break it down; the older chromates go first, and out comes the
story, sight, sound, smell, taste--all!"
"Touch?"
"If your interest is taken, your mind supplies that." Eagerness crept into
his voice. "You will look at it, Mr.----?"
"Burke," said Dan. "A swindle!" he thought. Then a spark of
recklessness glowed out of the vanishing fumes of alcohol. "Why not?"
he grunted.
He rose; Ludwig, standing, came scarcely to his shoulder. A queer
gnomelike old man, Dan thought as he followed him across the park
and into one of the scores of apartment hotels in the vicinity.
In his room Ludwig fumbled in a bag, producing a device vaguely

reminiscent of a gas mask. There were goggles and a rubber
mouthpiece; Dan examined it curiously, while the little bearded
professor brandished a bottle of watery liquid.
"Here it is!" he gloated. "My liquid positive, the story. Hard
photography--infernally hard, therefore the simplest story. A
Utopia--just two characters and you, the audience. Now, put the
spectacles on. Put them on and tell me what fools the Westman people
are!" He decanted some of the liquid into the mask, and trailed a
twisted wire to a device on the table. "A rectifier," he explained. "For
the electrolysis."
"Must you use all the liquid?" asked Dan. "If you use part, do you see
only part of the story? And which part?"
"Every drop has all of it, but you must fill the eye-pieces." Then as Dan
slipped the device gingerly on, "So! Now what do you see?"
"Not a damn' thing. Just the windows and the lights across the street."
"Of course. But now I start the electrolysis. Now!"
* * * * *
There was a moment of chaos. The liquid before Dan's eyes clouded
suddenly white, and formless sounds buzzed. He moved to tear the
device from his head, but emerging forms in the mistiness caught his
interest. Giant things were writhing there.
The scene steadied; the whiteness was dissipating like mist in summer.
Unbelieving, still gripping the arms of that unseen chair, he was staring
at a forest. But what a forest! Incredible, unearthly, beautiful! Smooth
boles ascended inconceivably toward a brightening sky, trees bizarre as
the forests of the Carboniferous age. Infinitely overhead swayed misty
fronds, and the verdure showed brown and green in the heights. And
there were birds--at least, curiously lovely pipings and twitterings were
all about him though he saw no creatures--thin elfin whistlings like
fairy bugles sounded softly.

He sat frozen, entranced. A louder fragment of melody drifted down to
him, mounting in exquisite, ecstatic bursts, now clear as sounding
metal, now soft as remembered music. For a moment he forgot the
chair whose arms he gripped, the miserable hotel room invisibly about
him, old Ludwig, his aching head. He imagined himself alone in the
midst of that lovely glade. "Eden!" he muttered, and the swelling music
of unseen voices answered.
Some measure of reason returned. "Illusion!" he told himself. Clever
optical devices, not reality. He groped for the chair's arm, found it, and
clung to it; he scraped his feet and found again an inconsistency. To his
eyes the ground was mossy verdure; to his touch it was merely a thin
hotel carpet.
The elfin buglings sounded gently. A faint, deliciously sweet perfume
breathed against him; he glanced up to watch the opening of a great
crimson blossom on the nearest tree, and a tiny reddish sun edged into
the circle of sky above him. The fairy orchestra swelled louder in its
light, and the notes sent a thrill of wistfulness through him. Illusion? If
it were, it made reality almost unbearable; he wanted to believe that
somewhere--somewhere this side of dreams, there actually existed this
region of loveliness. An outpost of Paradise? Perhaps.
And then--far through the softening mists, he caught a movement that
was not the swaying of verdure, a shimmer of silver more solid than
mist. Something approached. He watched the figure as it moved, now
visible, now hidden by trees; very soon he perceived that it was human,
but it was almost upon him before he realized that it was a girl.
She wore a robe of silvery,