The Machine Stops | Page 4

might happen". What did that mean? The
nonsense of a youthful man, no doubt, but she must go. Again she
pressed the unfamiliar button, again the wall swung back, and she saw
the tunnel that curves out of sight. Clasping the Book, she rose, tottered
on to the platform, and summoned the car. Her room closed behind her:
the journey to the northern hemisphere had begun.
Of course it was perfectly easy. The car approached and in it she found
armchairs exactly like her own. When she signaled, it stopped, and she
tottered into the lift. One other passenger was in the lift, the first fellow
creature she had seen face to face for months. Few travelled in these
days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike
all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had
hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of
going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to
Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their
bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.

The air-ship service was a relic form the former age. It was kept up,
because it was easier to keep it up than to stop it or to diminish it, but it
now far exceeded the wants of the population. Vessel after vessel
would rise form the vomitories of Rye or of Christchurch (I use the
antique names), would sail into the crowded sky, and would draw up at
the wharves of the south--empty, so nicely adjusted was the system, so
independent of meteorology, that the sky, whether calm or cloudy,
resembled a vast kaleidoscope whereon the same patterns periodically
recurred. The ship on which Vashti sailed started now at sunset, now at
dawn. But always, as it passed above Rheas, it would neighbour the
ship that served between Helsingfors and the Brazils, and, every third
time it surmounted the Alps, the fleet of Palermo would cross its track
behind. Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded
man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with
its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a
child.
Yet as Vashti saw the vast flank of the ship, stained with exposure to
the outer air, her horror of direct experience returned. It was not quite
like the air-ship in the cinematophote. For one thing it smelt--not
strongly or unpleasantly, but it did smell, and with her eyes shut she
should have known that a new thing was close to her. Then she had to
walk to it from the lift, had to submit to glances form the other
passengers. The man in front dropped his Book--no great matter, but it
disquieted them all. In the rooms, if the Book was dropped, the floor
raised it mechanically, but the gangway to the air-ship was not so
prepared, and the sacred volume lay motionless. They stopped--the
thing was unforeseen--and the man, instead of picking up his property,
felt the muscles of his arm to see how they had failed him. Then some
one actually said with direct utterance: "We shall be late"--and they
trooped on board, Vashti treading on the pages as she did so.
Inside, her anxiety increased. The arrangements were old-fashioned and
rough. There was even a female attendant, to whom she would have to
announce her wants during the voyage. Of course a revolving platform
ran the length of the boat, but she was expected to walk from it to her
cabin. Some cabins were better than others, and she did not get the best.

She thought the attendant had been unfair, and spasms of rage shook
her. The glass valves had closed, she could not go back. She saw, at the
end of the vestibule, the lift in which she had ascended going quietly up
and down, empty. Beneath those corridors of shining tiles were rooms,
tier below tier, reaching far into the earth, and in each room there sat a
human being, eating, or sleeping, or producing ideas. And buried deep
in the hive was her own room. Vashti was afraid.
"O Machine!" she murmured, and caressed her Book, and was
comforted.
Then the sides of the vestibule seemed to melt together, as do the
passages that we see in dreams, the lift vanished , the Book that had
been dropped slid to the left and vanished, polished tiles rushed by like
a stream of water, there was a slight jar, and the air-ship, issuing from
its tunnel, soared above the waters of a tropical ocean.
It was night. For a moment she saw the coast of Sumatra edged by the
phosphorescence of waves, and crowned by lighthouses, still sending
forth