Some Riddles Solved
The home of Professor Tan Trum was typical of the so-called "Second Class" citizen of the country of Wu. It was composed of five or six small rooms, excavated out of solid rock, and opening on one of the numerous side-galleries that threaded the underworld. There were no windows, but light was provided by the yellowish-green electric bulbs; while a constant supply of air was forced in through whirling fan-like devices located in little orifices near the front door. All in all, the Professor's abode was comfortable enough, although I could never accustom myself to the stone chairs and tables, to the stone beds without pillows, or to the grotesque hangings and adornments, composed of small likenesses of swords, helmets and land-battleships, which constituted the native idea of art.
The family of the Professor included his wife, Tan Tal, and his three daughters, Loa, Moa, and Noa. In them I made my first acquaintance with the feminine half of the population—and not few or slight were the surprises which they gave me! To begin with, there was the trouble of telling them apart, and in distinguishing the oldest from the youngest. On first entering the house, I assumed that Tan Tal, the mother, was the most youthful of the girls, while Loa, the last-born daughter, struck me as undoubtedly the parent. And this mistake, absurd as it may seem, was only natural, owing to the peculiar ideas of beauty entertained by the ladies of Wu.
For it was their opinion—in which the men seemed to share—that the supreme mark of a woman's loveliness was her wrinkles, and that the more wrinkles she boasted, particularly around the eyes and on the neck, the more alluring was her appearance. Hence all the damsels used to spend hours a day with wrinkle-producing creams, with permanent "wrinkle-wavers," and with other devices to create creases in their naturally smooth countenances; and only the old and matronly women, who were past the stage of trying to shine before their lovers, could afford to neglect the cosmetic arts and to let their features unwrinkle themselves.
It was for this reason that the young Loa, who, as I was later told, had barely reached seventeen, impressed me as a hag of advanced years. Her cheeks, her forehead, and her neck were furrowed in such a fashion as to remind me of a crone of ninety; while she was rendered all the more hideous, to my way of thinking, by the cream-colored paint with which she had daubed her lips, and by the fact that her eyelashes, in accordance with native custom, had been shaved away. Yet in the estimation of the chalk-faces, she was supremely beautiful!
There was another fact about Loa—and about all the other ladies—which grated horribly on my sensibilities. This was that, while the men wore skirts, the women all went around in trousers! All females, above the age of four or five, wore loose, pajama-like pantaloons of various colors; and it was considered unseemly, not to say indecent, for a lady to appear in any other costume; in fact, one of the maidens of my acquaintance was denied admittance to the best social circles because once, in jest, she had donned her brother's skirts.
In the same way, I myself was looked upon with suspicion, not to say contempt, because the trousers which I wore were considered unbecoming for a gentleman. Some persons, seeing me from a distance, made a mistake as to my sex, while others were so shocked that they went away shuddering with noses pointed high in the air in horror. Only after Professor Tan Trum had been officially notified of my delinquency, and had remedied the situation by providing me with one of his old black skirts, was I able to appear in respectable society.
I am sure that any of the local youths would have envied me the privilege that I now endured for several hours each day. This was to be instructed in the native language and institutions by the "beautiful" Loa. Professor Tan Trum, of course, supervised my education, but was so absorbed in his researches into the roots of extinct verbs that he could not give me more than a few minutes a day. Hence, it was natural that his daughter, having little else to do with her time, should be my instructress.
I must confess that she took her task, on the whole, conscientiously enough, although her first efforts were not to teach me the language, but to teach me how to pencil my eyebrows, whiten my cheeks and lips, and bleach my hair, so as to conform to the native idea of masculine beauty. Failing in these efforts, she resigned herself with a sigh to the inevitable; yet from the too-gentle and yearning way in which she glanced at me from time to time, I could see that my charms, such as they were, had had too much of an effect on her impressionable young heart. Already I had intimations that trouble was brewing!
But let me pass from this subject, for the present, to mention some of the astonishing facts I learned under her tutorage. First, of course, there was the necessity of studying the native language; but, fortunately, I made rapid steps in this direction, not so much because of any natural ability, as for the fact that Loa was a capable teacher, and because I made every effort to remember when she pointed to object after object and mentioned its native name, and then, after a time, began linking the words into simple sentences. I was like a little child first learning the language of its parents; but having, I confidently believe, a quicker intelligence than a child's, I was not long in absorbing the rudiments of the vernacular. Within two or three weeks, I could exchange elementary ideas; within a month, I could conduct a brief conversation; while, in less than three months, I was able to carry on an extended colloquy with any member of Tan Trum's household, and would not miss more than an occasional word, due to the limits of my vocabulary.
Strange, unbelievably strange, were my discoveries as to my new home. The underworld, composed of the twin countries of Wu and Zu, reached for hundreds of miles in all directions, and probably underlay not only most of Nevada, but much of Utah, Arizona, and adjoining states. This whole vast universe, comprising a multiplicity of great caverns and smaller connecting galleries, some of which reached down eight or ten miles, was inhabited by a population variously estimated as between forty and fifty millions—all of them chalk-faced and salmon-eyed, like the ones I had already seen. Neither Loa nor her father could tell me how long they had dwelt underground; their written records dated back thousands of years, and their claim was "Forever"! While there were traditions that once they had lived above ground, in a land of blue skies and open air from which they had been driven to escape annihilation in warfare, there were now no intelligent men to believe such tales, which were not only preposterous on the surface, but had never been proven by historical research. It was generally held that human life had originated in caves underground, and that, as population multiplied, men had excavated new caves and corridors to take care of the surplus millions.
So accustomed had the people become to their subterranean environment that it was impossible for them to appear above ground, unless they wore heavy metallic suits, like those of undersea divers, in order to protect them from the rays of the sun, which their white skins, having lost all pigment in the course of the ages, were no longer able to endure. Hence their belief, which scientists had verified by means of elaborate mathematical proofs, that no life could endure above ground, and hence the fact that none of them had ever been observed by our race; for only once every score of years would any scientist of Wu venture above ground, and even then he would emerge in some desert place where no human habitation existed.
But how did the millions of Wu and Zu manage to preserve life underground? How did they contrive to eat, breathe, and clothe themselves? That was one of the first questions I asked; and the answer came to me partly from Loa, and partly from my own observations.
The secret, as I had early surmised, was to be found in the prodigious scientific development of the Underworld. I do not exaggerate when I say that they were centuries in advance of our own race; they had evolved mechanical formulae and devices of which we have not the remotest conception. As an engineer by profession, I was naturally much interested in this phase of their growth; and while I was not able to study or understand all their numerous contrivances, yet I could understand enough to fill me with amazement and admiration. Every phase of the life of Wu, I found, depended upon science. Without it, they could not have existed for a single day; it was both astonishing and frightening to know how completely these people had come to rely upon their own inventions.
I shall not take time, at this point, to dwell upon all their elaborate appliances—which, indeed, would require a separate volume even for their enumeration. I shall leave out of account the intricate ventilating system, by which they pumped an adequate supply of air from the outer world; for I shall have occasion to refer to this again. Likewise, I shall not now describe their military engines, of which I have already given some idea, but which I was later to observe more intimately. I shall begin, therefore, by telling of the manufacture of food and clothing, which was conducted on principles I had never before considered possible.
Let me say, by way of explanation, that my food in the Professor's house had consisted entirely of queer-looking ingredients, comprised in part of purple capsules, such as I had been given in prison, and in part of a stringy, fibrous substance reminding me of seaweed. I was told, indeed, that the wealthier sections of the population occasionally enjoyed delicacies such as fish from subterranean rivers, and mushrooms grown in specially prepared cellars; but if Professor Tan Trum could afford such luxuries, he would not waste them on a barbarian such as myself.
My clothes, likewise, were of a substance I could not recognize—a woven substance a little like hemp and yet clearly not hemp, for it was not quite so coarse. But the fibres, on the other hand, did not resemble those of linen, cotton, silk, or wool. What could it be? The answer, as I learned from Loa, was that the native clothing, and likewise the food, was manufactured synthetically. From the most ordinary chemical ingredients—from oxygen and hydrogen as contained in water, from carbon as contained in carbon dioxide or in coal, from the nitrogen found in the air, and from the sulphur and phosphorus of the mines—they would create compounds resembling natural organic products.
The simplest of all to manufacture were starch and sugar, and a fibre like the cellulose of plants. For these, all that was required was a brilliant lamp, imitating the qualities of sunlight, a chemical cell which utilized the lamp-rays as the chlorophyll of the vegetable kingdom utilizes the solar beams, and an adequate supply of water and carbon. Thus the people might obtain all the carbohydrates they required for the table, and also all the fibres needed for weaving into paper and clothes; for, since cellulose constitutes the main ingredient of cotton and other vegetable fabrics, it was possible to produce a synthetic equivalent of the garments worn in the world above.
More difficult was the problem of the nitrogenous foodstuffs; but here again the ingenuity of the chalk-faces had proved equal to the task. I was never able to understand by exactly what process they had succeeded in combining nitrogen with oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and other substances to form albumin; but it is certain that this is precisely what they did, fusing the elements by means of an electric current and several catalytic agents, whose nature I was unable to learn.
Let me say, at this point, that I made every effort to find out; but the formula was the carefully guarded secret of the National Food Producers, Unlimited, a privately owned corporation, which was forbidden by law to tell the people the truth about the food they ate. Hence my efforts not only met with no success, but were so resented that I was threatened by the Company with imprisonment on the charge of unpatriotic activities.
In other fields, however, I was better able to satisfy my curiosity. I learned something of the power-system, by means of which the chalk-faces kept their factories running, excavated and illuminated the galleries, and conducted their warfare; I was told that they generated electrical energy in part from the flow of underground rivers, and in part by means of a chemical discovery made so long ago that no one remembered the inventor. This was the compound knows as Mulflar, an explosive at times beneficial, and at times annihilating in its effects.
Once again I was unable to discover the formula, for this was the exclusive property of the National Power Producers, who found it their most lucrative source of dividends, and had long ago succeeded in passing a law prohibiting themselves from making the facts public. The general principles underlying the invention, however, were well known. Mulflar was made by the union of nitrogen, phosphorus, magnesium, and sulphur with carbon, hydrogen, and one or two other elements in a compound both simply and easily produced. Its distinctive feature was its chemical unstability; its atoms would disintegrate and explode upon the slightest shock or upon the application of a spark, releasing a prodigious amount of energy through the conversion of that active element, hydrogen, into the chemically inert helium.
So great was the explosive power of Mulflar that a single gram, properly directed, was capable of blowing a hundred pounds of rock or iron to the height of half a mile. Naturally, a substance so dangerous had to be carefully controlled; and though accidents sometimes did occur, resulting in the occasional loss of a few hundred lives, in general it was highly adaptable to industrial uses. Shot off in small quantities in cannon-like tubes of specially prepared steel, it was used to set great dynamos into action, and consequently to furnish the larger part of the electricity indispensable to life. It was the energy of Mulflar, passed into storage batteries, that made it possible to run those little coaster-like cars with which I had had such a frightening experience; it was the energy of Mulflar that kept the lights and the ventilation in operation, that ran the food and clothing factories, and that pumped fresh water into pipes throughout the length and depth of the land.
But, at the same time, it was the energy of Mulflar that proved to be the worst enemy of the people. Never had I seen more convincing proof of how the most beneficial inventions may be transformed into engines of destruction! For it was Mulflar that accounted for the deadliness of the warfare waged by the chalk-faces; it was Mulflar that had produced those lightnings which Clay and I had watched in such fascinated horror; it was Mulflar that had supplied the motive-power for the land-battleships; it was Mulflar that had blown those gigantic machines to tatters. And it was Mulflar that was responsible for even more horrendous implements, which I was later to observe.
But before I report my discoveries in this regard, I must describe other peculiarities of the chalk-faces. And I must tell of one saddening conversation which I had with Loa and her father—a conversation which crushed one lingering spark of hope that had survived until then in the face of all discouragements.
This was in connection with my friend Clay. Hardly an hour went by but that I thought of him and his disappearance; hardly an hour but that I wondered whether he were alive or dead. True, I had heard nothing of him; but he might have been safe and well only a stone's throw away, and I would not have known it, since, at the time, I was confined in the Professor's house as closely as in a prison. Consequently, as soon as I was able to speak a few words in the native language, I asked about my friend.
The result could not have been more disappointing. Both Professor Tan Trum and his daughter looked astonished when they understood the nature of my inquiry. "What!" gasped my protector, with a sincerity that I could not question. "You say there were two like you? I wish there were! That would double the opportunities for verification of my theories!"
"Another like you?" questioned Loa, in milder tones; and then burst into a giddy explosion of laughter. "Why, that's just too good for words! I'm sure there couldn't be two like you in the whole deep world!"
Not knowing whether to take this as a compliment or not, I said nothing, while the Professor continued.
"My dear friend, if another man like you had been found anywhere in Wu, we would know of it instantly. The news would be flashed from end to end of the country—just as your own arrival has been."
"My friend wasn't exactly like me," I explained, fighting against a sinking sensation that all but overcame me. "He was taller, and his hair was red—"
For the first time in my experience, the Professor bent nearly double with laughter, his great ungainly frame rocking back and forth in mirth. It seemed minutes before he and Loa could suppress their merriment. "His hair was red?" echoed Tan Trum, riotously. "Red? Red, you say? My dear man, who ever heard of red hair?"
And both he and his daughter went off again into spasms of laughter.
My only consolation was the reflection that, although Clay appeared hopelessly lost, still, if he ever were found, I would hear of it, since no red-haired man had ever been seen before in all the land of Wu.