Nordenholt's Million

by J. J. Connington

  But we had seen all this before and had seen it, too, followed by a collapse; so that we waited eagerly to learn how the engine would stand the strain. For an hour we waited there, while the mechanics poured oil continually into the tanks to keep the racing bearings from heating; and still the machine ran smoothly and the thunder of the escape-pipe roared above us. It was impossible to make oneself heard amid that clangour; and we exchanged congratulations scribbled on odd pieces of paper. After an hour, Milne shut off the disintegrator; and the great engine slowly sank to rest.

  All of us were still deafened by the sound of the exhaust; and it was by dumb-show and a handshake that Nordenholt conveyed his thanks to the two designers. I heard a faint cheer from the workmen.

  Nordenholt did not stay long. Within a few minutes, he and I were back in the motor, on the way home. As we went, I heard behind us the tremendous blast of the escaping gases; they had restarted the engine; and to my ears it sounded sweeter than any symphony, for it meant safety to us all.

  *****

  When we reached the University, I noticed that Nordenholt stepped from the car with the air of an invalid. He seemed to have used up all his forces in a last effort; and now he moved slowly and almost with difficulty. At the Randolph Stair, he took my arm and leaned heavily on me as we climbed a step at a time. When we reached the top, he seemed out of breath. At last we reached his office and he dropped into his chair at the desk with visible relief.

  “It’s my heart, Jack,” he said, after a moment or two. “It’s been going wrong for months; and I think it’s badly strained. I knew it was going; and in ordinary circumstances I would have looked after myself; but it wasn’t worth while, as things were I simply couldn’t take things easy. I had to work on until I saw daylight before me or dropped on the way.”

  He paused, as though pulling his strength together. In the next room I could hear Elsa’s typewriter clicking. Nordenholt heard it also; and rose after a few minutes. He went to the door between the two rooms and spoke to her, telling her the news of the engine.

  “It’s success at last, Elsa. We’re through. Everything’s safe now.”

  I heard her voice in reply; and then he closed the door and reseated himself at the desk.

  “It’s your turn now, Jack. I’ve done my part. I’m leaving the future in your hands; and I believe you’ll make good. I wish I could help you; but I’m done, now. I would only hamper you if I tried to do anything.”

  I tried to say something reassuring, but the words faltered on my lips. The sight of that drawn face was proof enough. Nordenholt had driven his physical machine as ruthlessly as he had driven his factory workers; and it was clear that he had overstrained his bodily powers. His tremendous will had kept him on his feet until the moment of success; but I could see now what it had cost him. He had drawn on his vital capital; and with the accomplishment of his task a revulsion had set in and the overtired body was exacting its toll.

  As I sat looking at him there, a great feeling of loneliness swept over me. Here, before me, was the man upon whose strength I had leaned for the past months, the mind which had seen so clearly, the will which had held its line so tenaciously; and now, I felt, Nordenholt was leaning on me in his turn. It seemed almost an inversion of the course of Nature; and with the realisation of it, I felt a sense of an enormous loss. In the next stages of the Area’s history, there would be no Nordenholt to lean upon: I would have to stand on my own feet, and I doubted my capacity. Almost without my recognising it, I had been working always with Nordenholt in my mind, even in my own department. I had carried out things boldly because I knew that ever in reserve behind me were that brain and that will of his which could see further and drive harder than I could dare; and I had relied unconsciously upon him to steer me through my difficulties if they proved too great for my own powers. And now, by the look on his face and the weariness of his voice, I knew that I stood alone. I had no right to throw my burdens on his shoulders any more.

  And with a gulp in the throat, I remembered that he trusted me to go forward. I suppose I ought to have felt some joy in the knowledge that he had left the reconstruction in my hands; but any pride I had in this was swallowed up in that devastating feeling of loss. With the collapse of Nordenholt, something had gone out of my world, never to return. It left me in some way maimed; and I felt as though the main source of my strength had been cut away just when I most needed all my powers.

  “You’ll do your best, Jack? The Area trusted us. Don’t let them down.”

  I tried to tell him I would do my utmost; but I had difficulty in finding words. I could see that he understood me, however.

  “There’s one thing I’m sorry about—Elsa. She hasn’t come round yet. But she will, in time. She hates me still, I know; and it’s a pity, for I need her now, more than I ever did before. I’m a very sick man, Jack. Luckily, this breach between us has let her stand on her own feet. She doesn’t need me so much as she did.” He fell silent; and for a time we sat without speaking. When he spoke again, I could see the lines on which his thoughts had been running.

  “If anything happens to me, Jack, you’ll look after Elsa, won’t you? I’d like to know that she was all right. I know it’s hard as things are; but you’ll do that for me, even though it tantalises you?”

  I promised; and then I suggested telephoning for a doctor to look after him.

  “Not just now, Jack—I’m tired. I don’t want to be bothered answering questions. I’m very tired. . . . And I’ve finished my work at last. We’ve pulled through. I can take a rest. . . . Wake me in a quarter of an hour, will you? I want a sleep badly.”

  He leaned forward in his chair and rested his face on his arms. In a moment he seemed to fall into slumber. I thought it was probably the best thing for him at the time; and I turned to the fire and to my thoughts.

  I fell to thinking of all that had happened since first I met him; and then I cast further back yet to the evening I had spent at Wotherspoon’s house. How the disaster had developed step by step, spreading its effects gradually and with slowly-increasing intensity over wider and ever-wider areas. If only Wotherspoon had stuck to chemistry and left bacteriology alone; if only he had chosen some other organisms than the denitrifying bacteria; if only the fireball had not come that night; if . . . if . . . if. . . . All the might-have-beens rose before me as I gazed at the flickerings in the fire. If only Elsa had followed reason and not emotion . . . if only . . . And so the maddening train of thought went on, minute by minute, while in the next room I could hear the click of her typewriter. Emotion! After all I could not pretend to scorn it, for what were my own feelings but emotion too?

  The clock in the tower above me struck a quarter. Nordenholt did not stir and I let him sleep on. It appeared to me that rest was what he needed most.

  It seemed curious how divorced I had become from the Past. The old life had been swept away utterly and I found difficulty in recalling much of it to mind. The meeting with Nordenholt, the founding of the Area, my time with Elsa, London in its last days, the Reverend John: these were the things which seemed burned into my memory. All that had gone before was mirage, faint, unsubstantial, part of another existence. Even our Fata Morgana was more real to me than that old life.

  And with that I fell back into deeper gloom. I have not tried to paint myself other than I am. I had never reached the height of pure endeavour to which Nordenholt had attained, though sometimes, under his influence, I came near it. And now, at the recollection of our dream city, I felt a keen pang. Why should I attempt to raise that fabric to the skies, why should I wear myself out in toiling to erect these halls and palaces through which I must wander alone? Why, indeed? What was the population of the Area to me, after all? But even amid my most bitter reflections I knew that I would do my best. Nordenholt had trusted me.

  A fresh chime from the great bell overhead roused me from my musings. I went across to Nordenholt, not knowing whether to wake him or not. When I reached his side, so
mething in his attitude struck me. I touched his hand and found it cold.

  For a moment, I think I failed to recognise what had happened. Then I shook him gently; and the truth broke upon my mind. That great engine which had wrought so hard and so long would never move again. The brain which had guided the fortunes of the Area up to the last moment had sunk to its eternal rest.

  It was some minutes before I was able to pull myself together after the discovery. When I got my feelings under control, I was still badly shaken; for otherwise I would never have done what I did do. I went straight to the door and called Elsa. She was sitting at her desk and she looked up at my voice.

  “Well, what is it, Mr. Flint?”

  “It’s . . . Come here. . . . It’s Nordenholt; he . . .”

  Before I had completed the sentence she had risen and passed me. I think she must have seen something in my face which led her to expect the worst news. She went up to the desk where Nordenholt was still leaning with his face on his arms. Like me, she did not immediately grasp what had happened.

  “Uncle Stanley! What’s wrong? Aren’t you well?”

  She rested her hand on his shoulder and shook him gently, just as I had done. In the silence, I heard, far down the Clyde, the roaring of the atomic engine—the great call sweeping across the Area and bearing with it the news of Nordenholt’s final triumph. They were varying the running of the machine and the waves of sound rose and fell like the beating of gigantic wings above the city.

  Suddenly she turned to me.

  “What is it? You don’t mean he’s dead?”

  I could only nod in answer; I could not find words. For an instant she stood, leaning over him, and then she slipped down beside his chair and put her arms round him.

  “Oh, he’s dead. He’s dead. He’ll never speak to me again! . . . And I hated him, I hated him. . . . I made it hard for him. . . . And now he can’t tell me if he forgives me. . . . Oh, what shall I do, Jack? What shall I do? Please help me. He was so good to me; and I hurt him so. . . . Oh, please help me, Jack. Tell me he forgave me. . . . I’ve only got you now. . . .”

  CHAPTER XX

  ASGARD

  IMMEDIATELY after the death of Nordenholt, I took over the control of the Area and instituted the great reorganisation forced upon us by the new conditions. Almost our last reserves of coal were used up in the foundries where we built the new atomic engines; but we succeeded in manufacturing a number of machines sufficient for our purposes; and once these were complete, we had no further need of the old-fashioned fuel. The output of nitrogenous materials sprang up by leaps and bounds; and the danger of starvation was over.

  All our miners were sent into the neighbouring areas, where they were put to work in spreading synthetic nitrogenous manure upon the fields, after Hope’s colloids had been ploughed into the soil to retain water in the ground. At last came the harvest, poor in most places, yet sufficient for our needs. The game was won.

  It was after this that we began to send aeroplanes over the world in search of any other remnants of the human race which had survived. I was too much occupied with Area affairs to share in these voyages; but the airmen’s reports made clear enough the extent of the catastrophe which had befallen the planet. As I expected, the site of London was covered with a mere heap of charred and shattered ruins cumbering it to an extent that prevented us from even thinking of rebuilding the city in the new age. It was not worth while clearing away the debris, when other sites were open to us for our new centres of population. The same fate had befallen almost all the great cities, not only in Britain but also across the Continent. Above the ruins of Paris, the gaunt fabric of the Eiffel Tower still stood as a witness to men’s achievements in the past; but it was almost alone. Everything capable of destruction by fire had gone down in the frenzy of the last days of the old civilisation.

  I have already sketched the effects of the Famine upon the population of the globe. Our explorers found one or two colonies alive in America; and at a slightly later date we got in touch with the Japanese Area. Beyond this, the human race had perished from the face of the earth.

  The strangest of all the changes seen by the aerial explorers must have been in Central Africa and the Amazon Valley. There, where vegetable life had seemed undisputed sovereign of vast regions, only a blackened wilderness remained. Fires had raged over great spaces, leaving ashes behind them; but in general there was hardly a trace of the old-time forests and swamps. The Sahara stretched southward to the Equator; and the Kalahari Desert had extended up to the Great Lakes—so quickly had the soil of these regions degenerated into sand. In past ages, man had never tapped these vast store-houses of forest and veldt; and Fate decided that they should go down to destruction still unutilised.

  Once the safety-line was passed and we were assured of food sufficient to maintain our people, other troubles faced us; and I am not sure that the next ten years was not really our most dangerous period. Had Nordenholt lived, things would perhaps have been easier for us; but the difficulties besetting us were implicit in the nature of things and I question if he could have exorcised them entirely.

  We had, on the one side, a mass of manual labourers whose intelligence unfitted them for anything beyond bodily toil; while on the other hand we had supplies of physical energy from the atomic engines which made the employment of human labour supererogatory. Yet to leave the major part of our population entirely idle was to invite disaster. The development of the atomic engine had at one blow thrown out of gear the nicely-adjusted social machinery devised by Nordenholt; and we had to arrange almost instantly vast alterations in our methods of employment.

  It was under the pressure of these conditions that we became builders of great cities. Nineveh and Thebes were our first sketches; then came Atlantis, our main power-station which we built on Islay; after that we erected Lyonnesse and Tara, fairer than the others, for we learned as we wrought. Then, as I began to grope towards my masterpiece, I planned Theleme. And, last of all, the spires and towers of Asgard grew into the sky.

  Once the cities had been planned, we employed a further contingent of labour in constructing huge roads between them, gigantic arteries which cut across the country like the Roman ways in earlier centuries, arrow-straight, but broader and better engineered than anything before constructed.

  Our building materials were new. The introduction of atomic energy gave us electric furnaces on a scale undreamed of before; and we were able to produce a glassy and resistant substance which can be made in any tint. It is of this that Asgard is constructed; and I believe that no weather conditions alone will wear it down.

  *****

  As I sit here at my desk, I see outstretched before me the panorama of Asgard, the concrete embodiment of our Fata Morgana, so far as that vision could be made real in stone. It is not the City of our dreams, I admit; yet in its beauty there is a touch of wonder and of mystery that makes it kin to that builded phantom of our minds. None of our cities shall ever bear the name of Fata Morgana, which was the mother of them all. There shall be no profanation of that castle in the air. Instead we have given to our cities titles which link their material splendours to the more ancient glories of myth and tradition; Asgard and Lyonnesse, Tara and Atlantis, Nineveh, Thebes and Theleme.

  Rarely, nowadays, do I feel despondent; but when the fit comes over me, I open the box in which I still keep the papers relating to the time when I was planning my garden cities. I finger my documents and turn over my sketches, ever amazed at the gulf which lies between my hopes of that day and our achievements of the present. Here and there, on the margin of some modest ground-plan, I find scribbled notes of caution to myself not to expect such vast projects to be practicable in the near future. And then, after losing myself in this atmosphere of the past, I go to the great windows and look down upon Asgard. For once, at least in this world, hope has been far outrun by achievement. Splendours of which I never dreamed have come into being and lie before my eyes as I gaze. With all this confront
ing me, my despondency slips away and I regain sure confidence in the future.

  Cities and gardens have I raised in Dreamland. Other cities and other gardens I have seen spring from the ground of this world in answer to my call. But of all these, Asgard is nearest to my heart; for it is the last which I shall create. Other men will surpass me; new wonderlands will rise in the future: but Asgard is my masterpiece and I shall build no more.

  Ten years have gone by since the last stone was laid in my city; yet every morning as I come to my windows, I find in it fresh beauties to delight my eyes. Fronting the sea it stands; and its fore-court is a vast stretch of silver sand between the horns of the bay. Behind it the ground rises to a semi-circle of low hills set here and there with groves and fretted with silver waterfalls. Through all the changes of the year these slopes are green; for snow never drifts upon them nor do mists gather to hide them from my view. Only the swift cloud-shadows flitting athwart them bring fresh lights and shades into the picture as they pass.

  Nor do I weary of this greenery. Slowly vegetation is creeping back upon the face of the world; but still there are vast deserts where no blade grows: and in my own cities I planned masses of verdure so that they might be like oases among the barren spaces of the earth.

  Between the hills and the sea, the city stands—a vast space of woods and fields and gardens from among the greenery of which rise here and there high halls and palaces of rose-tinted stone. Here and there amid the green lie broad lakes to catch the sun; and great tree-shadowed pools, like crystal mirrors, stand rippleless among the groves. And throughout the city there is ever the sound of streams and rivulets falling from the hills and making music for us with their murmurings as they pass.

  Scattered about this pleasance are the dwellings of my citizens, built of the rose-coloured stone which breaks the monotony of the verdure; but the houses are sparse, for our population is small. Asgard is only for the few who can enjoy its beauties: the many have other cities more suited to their tastes; and they have no wish to come hither. But those who dwell with us have full time to fall under its spell; for Asgard is a city of leisure, though not an idle one.