THE SECRET OF INTERMERE PARTIALLY REVEALED TO ANDERTON, AND WHEN HE LEAST EXPECTS IT HE IS RESTORED TO HIS HOME AND KINDRED, MUCH TO HIS REGRET.

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VI.

THE SECRET OF INTERMERE.

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The secret of Intermere—its great mechanical secret—was revealed to me, but, alas! only in part. It was as if the sun be pointed out to a child who is told that it shines and is a prime factor in the growth of all forms of life, animal and vegetable.

The child realizes that the orb of day shines, but remains wholly in the dark as to the processes of its rays; why it inspires animals and vegetation with life and growth, and produces the prismatic colors of the rainbow.

So with me. I know the fountain-head or cause that gave momentum to all the mechanism of the land, shortened the period between germination and maturity in vegetation, banished fire while retaining warmth, turned the night into a season of beauty equaling the full day, kept every street and highway free from debris, prevented foul emanations, with their contaminations, and did countless other things which our own scientists demonstrate are desirable and necessary, but still unattainable. But of the details, of the why and the wherefore, of the effects and the processes by which so many different results emanated from the same apparent cause, I learned nothing.

One morning, after a season of delicious, invigorating slumber, as I walked in the spacious grounds of my host, the Chief Citizen of the Province—grounds sweeter and fairer than the fabled Gardens of Gulistan—I saw a fleet of Aerocars approaching, led by one of the most magnificent, and by far the largest, that I had yet seen. It could not have been less than one hundred feet in length and twenty in breadth at the midway point, and yet it seemed to float as lightly as a feather in the aerial depths.

When almost directly overhead the fleet halted, and remained stationary, as though firmly anchored to some immovable substance, and then the leading craft slowly sank to the earth at my feet, as lightly as you have seen a bird alight.

It was the Aerocar of Remo, containing a score of people. I had not hitherto met Remo, the Curator of Useful Mechanical Devices. However, he needed no introduction to me or I to him. The recognition was mutual.

He came forward and greeted me cordially, and later presented me to his fellow voyagers, and said:

"I know you are anxious to learn something of the motive principle of our mechanisms. That I shall impart to you, at least partially. Our journey will begin to suit your convenience. We will breakfast en route."

I hastened to say my adieux to the Chief Citizen, Alpaz, and the members of the household, and then entered the Aerocar, taking a seat near Remo. At a signal to the pilot, the craft rose as lightly and majestically as it had descended.

I looked about me at the passengers, hampers of provisions, culinary utensils and table equipment, and estimated that the Aerocar was carrying not less than four thousand pounds of dead weight.

"You are wondering how so much bulk and weight ascend without apparent cause."

I assented to the proposition.

"When you are at home and see an inflated balloon ascend, carrying a man weighing one hundred and fifty pounds, with seventy-five pounds of sand ballast, you can understand how it ascends?"

"Readily."

"By mechanical contrivance of immense comparative bulk, aided by chemical product, the power of gravitation is sufficiently overcome or neutralized that a disproportionately small amount of weight is carried into the upper air. We ascend for the same general reason, the resultant of a greater, a different and a fixed principle.

"Our pilot, by means of the mechanical and other power at his command, neutralized the attraction of gravitation, and without the aid of any other appliance arose, carrying a weight of more than four thousand of your pounds avoirdupois. It has ascended in a direct or perpendicular line, despite the breeze, which would otherwise have carried us at a western angle. I will have the pilot produce an equilibrium, stopping all movement."

A signal was given the pilot, and, after a slight manipulation, it stood still.

"Now we will descend, first perpendicularly and then at an angle of forty-five degrees."

One signal and one manipulation, and the Aerocar described the first motion. A second signal and manipulation, and it described the other.

"Now we will ascend, first by the reverse angle and then by the perpendicular."

Again the signals and again the manipulations, and again the exact movements through space.

"If your flying machine and airship builders could do that, what would your people think?"

"That the world had been revolutionized."

"But the world will not be thus revolutionized until science is freed of gross materialism and human aspiration becomes something higher than selfish greed, commercialism, war, conquest, opulence, and the despotisms they engender. You must expel all the gods with whom you most closely commune, before you may commune with the true God or Supreme Principle of the Universe."

In the meantime the Curator's Aerocar had rejoined its consorts, and we floated away to the northeast, where a great semicircle of mountains were dimly outlined, and then descended upon a city looking like a pearl in a semicircular valley, bisected by a broad river, spanned with bridges at short intervals as far as the vision reached.

With my watch I had timed the voyage. It had lasted two hours and thirty minutes.

"How far have we traveled?" I inquired of Remo.

"One thousand of your miles."

"That is four hundred miles to the hour; six and two-thirds miles each minute."

"The speed might easily have been doubled."

My amazement was unbounded, but I did not doubt Remo's statement then. Later, I recognized it as an easy possibility.

Remo detained me until the rest of the company had left the Aerocar, and then said abruptly: "You would learn the secret of the motive principle that moves our mechanical devices and performs other offices which seem to you miraculous. It is this: It is the electric current which we take direct from the atmosphere at will—electricity, which is the life-giving, life-preserving and life-promoting principle, the superior and fountain of all law affecting the material Universe and intervening space. To command that is to command everything.

"This is the capital of my Curatorship. Here all my predecessors have served the Commonwealth; hither all my successors will come. Here every mechanical device is tested, approved or rejected, and from hence their production is directed, as a public right, in every municipal division of the Commonwealth.

"Nearly every monument you have seen, as you have doubtless noticed, is dedicated to some Chosen Son of Wisdom, and some of them date back tens of centuries. Whoever makes a great discovery, such as taking the electric current direct, or dividing its capabilities into useful and necessary directions, or perfects some great mechanism, securing the full beneficence of the current, brings it here and dedicates it to the Commonwealth and its sons and daughters. Its benefits are common to all.

"His reward is that he is elected by universal acclaim as the Chosen Son of Wisdom, a monument commemorative of his achievement is erected at once, and he is installed in a home furnished out of the public revenues, receives a stipend of fifty or five cinque media daily, and is the honored guest on all public and private occasions.

"I shall show you many of our devices; some of them will be self-explanatory, some will, to a degree, be explained, others left to your conjecture, and for obvious reasons."

With this he led me through a large number of what we would look upon as diminutive manufacturing establishments. In the first one visited he exhibited to me two crystalline elongated globes, the size of an egg each, connected by a small tube or cylinder of the same material two or three inches in length.

The globes were filled with a whitish substance, or granulation, the upper intensely white, the lower somewhat shaded. The upper one was fitted with a movable disk, and could be opened by touching a lever. A cluster of rather coarse wires, apparently an amalgam of several metals, rose above the granulated contents. A double coil of wires, of a different material or combination, running in opposite directions, filled the connecting cylinder, while a cluster of almost imperceptibly fine wires, of still a different material or combination, projected from the bottom of the lower globe.

These globes resembled glass, and were, to all appearances, extremely fragile. Remo dashed it upon the hard floor, as though he would destroy it. It rebounded, and he caught it as an urchin would catch a rebounding ball.

"I did this," he said, "to show you that these appliances are not amenable to accident. This is the accumulator or receiver of the current."

He touched the lever and opened a small aperture directly over the cluster of wires in the upper globe.

"Hold your hand below the lower portion," he said.

I complied, and instantly my hand was moved away with such resistless force that I was turned completely around and sent across the room. Remo smiled at my undisguised consternation, and said:

"You will not be harmed. What you experienced was the flow of the electric current, but it has not harmed you. It is physically harmless. You would call this a twenty-horse-power motor in your country, although it looks like a toy. Take it and handle it as I direct. You may handle it with perfect safety. Place it horizontally near that fly-wheel and push the lever."

He pointed to a fly-wheel scarcely a foot in diameter, with seven radiating flanges set slightly at an angle. I did, and opened the aperture. In less time than it takes to tell it the wheel was revolving at a rate of speed so high that it seemed like a solid motionless and polished mirror.

"Close the aperture, go to the side in which direction it is revolving, and again open it to the current."

I did so, and instantly the wheel was motionless.

He pointed to a huge block of granite, which rested on a metal framework a dozen inches above the floor, and said: "Banish all nervousness, invert the accumulator, and hold it under the center of the block, which weighs five of your tons."

I did so, and it slowly rose toward the ceiling.

"Close the aperture slowly, and finally close it entirely."

This I did, and it settled back to its original place.

"There," said Remo, "you have the direct current and its direct application to machinery and inert bodies. You know enough about mechanics to understand what that means. The ascent and flight and movements and descent of the Aerocar; the running of the Medocar and the sailing of the Merocar, are not such a profound mystery to you as they were yesterday."

He conducted me into another factory and exhibited a number of accumulators, each filled with apparently the same granulated substance, but of different colors and admixture of colors. Remo opened the apertures of a long line of them upon a wire rack, and they flashed into brilliant lamps of every hue and color and shade—a light that was as steady as that of the stars. He closed them one by one, showing the absolute independence of each.

"Our lamps, with which we beautify the night, are no longer a mystery to you—that is, not an absolute mystery."

In another factory he exhibited more accumulators with varicolored materials in the globes. He opened one and directed its power toward an ingot of metal. It melted like wax. Turning its force upon a fragment of rock, it was transformed into the ordinary dust of our roadways. With another he turned a vessel of water into a solid block of ice.

"Our topographical construction, our culinary economy and the absence of fire are now plainer than they were."

"But how do you achieve all these different results with apparently the same means?"

"The first device shown you is the primary; the others are subsequent discoveries. By the primary medium we were able to produce or secure the electric current in the form of dynamic power, eminently tractable and harmless with ordinary prudence. New combinations of the medium gave us all the other results, at intervals, subsequent to the original discovery. And the field is not exhausted."

Remo explained that the crystalline substance in the upper globe of the accumulator induced or gathered the electric current, giving it controllable direction as well as defined volume, while that in the lower determined its significance or divisional use.

In the minuter accumulators, for the lamps only, did the current present itself in the form of light, spark or flame. All the colors, from pure white to deep purple, with their prismatic variations, were the direct result of their differing chemical combinations in the lower globe, each of the silk-like wires throwing off countless rays of unvarying intensity and steadiness, but gave off no electric phenomena or effects.

The heat accumulators gave moderate or intense heat, according to the chemical combinations through which the primary current passed, but there was neither glow nor light-flash. So, too, the cold accumulators gave off varying degrees of cold, for the same reason.

In none of them was there either the electric shock or its effects, and all were tractable and free from danger in what we may term the electrical sense. The dynamic force of the primary and the intense heat or cold of the divisional currents, common prudence avoids. Still it would be easily possible, by chemical combination, to produce a current destructive of life and capable of annihilating nations, without hope or possibility of escape.

"Your own scientists know," said Remo, "that with the direct current all that you have seen, and infinitely more, is but the result of a simple process, capable of infinite multiplication."

"But what are the constituents of the medium in the accumulator, and what are the formulas of the various combinations?"

"If you knew that you would know as much as we."

This was the nearest a jest I had heard in Intermere, but I knew from the character of Remo's speech that the rest of the secret would remain hidden from me.

As we sat at his table later he said:

"You have been nearer to our secret than any one else in the outer world, and we shall see whether the seeds will grow into the tree of Knowledge and produce the fruits of Wisdom. Neither your people nor any other people could be trusted with this secret in their present moral condition. A few learned men dependent upon the rulers in one nation, knowing it, could and would plot the destruction and exploitation of all others. The sacrifice of human life and the accumulation of human woe and misery would be appalling.

"If your leaders, with the suddenly awakened hunger for conquest and dominion, could literally command the thunderbolts and control the elements as against the rest of the world, they would sack Christendom in the name of Liberty, Humanity and the Babe of Bethlehem, but in the spirit of Mammon, Greed and selfish love of power and riches.

"You will make some progress in discoveries along scientific and mechanical lines, but no real good to the race can result until these discoveries are turned to a nobler purpose than that of seizing commercial supremacy, subjugating alien and unwilling peoples, slaughtering those who resist, exploiting those who lay down their arms, gathering wealth regardless of justice and the rights of mankind and building up an artificial race in the form of a ruling class, who base their right to exclusive privileges on wealth and the perversion of every principle of justice and the Christianity they profess.

"You have been wondering why, with our great knowledge and achievements, we do not go forth and dominate the world. What would it profit us? Could we find anything that would contribute to our enjoyments, our hopes, our aspirations? No.

"Even we are not proof against the paralyzing touch of deterioration. We pay more heed to the world's history than do the nations and peoples who made that history, during the centuries. History is but the lighthouse which warns against the reefs and rocks where countless argosies have been lost. The mariners who sail the ships of state dash recklessly upon the rocks of destruction, despite the friendly warnings of the dead and engulfed who have gone before."

Turning to lighter themes, Remo spoke of the various economies of the Commonwealth, and explained how the obstacles which confront our civilization are overcome. Garbage and all debris, for instance, are disposed of by instantaneous reduction to original conditions, and then a recombination and distribution upon the grounds, farms and gardens. The sewage question, the standing menace of all dense and even sparse populations, is solved by the same process of purification and recombination. This work is constantly performed under the eye of the municipal authorities, and under fixed rules and service. Thus the absolute cleanliness which prevailed everywhere was readily explained.

In answer to my query why Intermere had so long escaped discovery from navigators, he said, interrogatively:

"Would it not be possible, with our superior knowledge and wisdom, to put their reckoning at fault whenever they came within a fixed sphere of proximity?"

To my question as to the equability of the seasons, the absence of storms, and the regularity of the descent of moisture in the form of gentle rains, he said:

"Do not imagine that our scientific knowledge stops with the mere discovery of the direct electric current or our mechanical devices."

Nothing further could I elicit from him or any other Intermerean on these or kindred subjects. The Book of Knowledge had been opened and apparently closed.

After two days' stay in Remo's capital the Aerocars took up a goodly entourage, and we moved softly and swiftly to the Greater City.

There Xamas and all his officials awaited us, along with every Intermerean of both sexes I had met in my journeys, as well as every Municipal Custodian of the realm, and in addition the Chief Citizens of the fourteen Provinces I had not visited.

A reception fete was given me in the chief temple of the city, hoary with age and instinct with wisdom. There were songs and music by the young and happy, and apropos discourses by the older. I essayed the role of orator, thanked my entertainers for their many courtesies and the happy hours they had conferred upon a wanderer in a strange land. The afternoon and evening were a season of unalloyed happiness.

As I dropped into slumber in the house of Xamas I soliloquized: "This kindness and these honors seem significant. Perhaps the Intermereans intend to adopt me into all their knowledge and wisdom. Perhaps"——

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I felt that I was tossing on the swell of the ocean. Then there was a sensation of physical pain, as if from long exposure to the elements.

So keen was this sensation that I awoke fully, started up and looked around me. It was a grayish dawn, purpling in lines near the horizon. Towering above me I saw the outlines of a great ship, lying at anchor and lazily nodding as the swells swept into the harbor.

I found myself in one of the individual Merocars, intended for a single passenger, but the compartments containing the accumulatory motors had been removed and the marks of removal deftly concealed.

It was one of the most finished Merocars of its class with the exception of the motor, constructed entirely of prepared wood, resembling a piece of wicker work, but impervious to the sea, and floated like a cork or a feather.

I was trying to determine where I was and how I came to be in my present situation. Then came to me this in the Language of Silence:

"You have been safely delivered to those who will restore you to your land and home. Discretion is always commendable."

I knew whence this thought came, and soon the increasing light showed me that I was in the harbor of Singapore, lashed with a silken cord to the forechains of an East Indian merchantman.

To my infinite regret I found that I was clad in the same clothes I wore when the Mistletoe went to the bottom. The same trinkets and a few coins and the other accessories were still in the pockets.

But the handsome and natty garments of Intermere were gone. I was back in the world just as I left it, how long ago I could not tell, for the memories of Intermere seemed to cover a decade at least, and I estimated that those who lived to one hundred enjoyed a thousand years of life.

The lookout on the ship finally discovered me, and shortly after I and my curious boat were lifted to the deck and became the center of a gaping crowd.

As I could not account for myself reasonably, I became merely evasive and did not account for myself at all, and left the crew and passengers equally divided as to whether I was a lunatic of a cunning knave.

Among those on board was one whose presence suggested Intermere. I listened and observed, and learned that he was the Secretary of a native Rajah on board the ship. He inspected me with curious disappointment. The Merocar he seemed to worship both with eyes and soul.

"Sell it to him, for you need money."

That was Maros; I could not be mistaken.

The Secretary motioned me to a distant part of the deck and said abruptly:

"I will give you five thousand rupees for the—for the"——

"Merocar."

He started as though shocked by a bolt of lightning.

"I dare not talk—I cannot remember—but I dare not talk. Will you sell it me for five thousand rupees, Sahib? It is all I have, but I will give it freely."

"It is yours."

He went below and soon returned with the amount in bills of exchange upon the bank at Hong Kong.

He carried his purchase to his stateroom, amid the laughter of passengers and sailors, who did not conceal their merriment that any man would pay such a price for a wicker basket, and my cunning and hypnotic knavery were thoroughly established.

I remained a few days in Singapore, converting my bills partly into cash and partly into exchange on London and New York.

Sailing later to Hong Kong, I there fell in with an American military officer whom I knew, and who gave me the full particulars of Albert Marshall's death. With him I made arrangements for the shipment of my cousin's remains to his old home, via San Francisco.

Two days later I sailed for London, and within six weeks reached New York, and the home of my childhood. I shall not describe the meeting with my mother, nor speak of what was said in relation to the strange and brief communications which passed between us months before.

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