"I have had no experience," said Freder, tentatively, "except that I believe for the first time in my life to have comprehended the being of a machine… "
"That should mean a great deal," replied the Master over Metropolis. "But you are probably wrong, Freder. If you had really comprehended the being of a machine you would not be so perturbed."
Slowly the son turned his eyes and the helplessness of his incomprehension to his father.
"How can one but be perturbed," he said, "if one comes to you, as I did, through the machine-rooms. Through the glorious rooms of your glorious machines… and sees the creatures who are fettered to them by laws of eternal watchfulness… lidless eyes… "
He paused. His lips were dry as dust.
Joh Fredersen leant back. He had not taken his gaze from his son, and still held it fast.
"Why did you come to me through the machine-rooms," he asked quietly. "It is neither the best, nor the most convenient way."
"I wished," said the son, picking his words carefully, "Just once to look the men in the face — whose little children are my brothers — my sisters… "
"H'm," said the other with very tight lips. The pencil which he held between his fingers tapped gently, dryly, once, twice, upon the table's edge. Joh Fredersen's eyes wandered from his son to the twitching flash of the seconds on the clock, then sinking back again to him.
"And what did you find?" he asked.
Seconds, seconds, seconds of silence. Then it was as though the son, up-rooting and tearing loose his whole ego, threw himself, with a gesture of utter self-exposure, upon his father, yet he stood still, head a little bent, speaking softly, as though every word were smothering between his lips.
"Father! Help the men who live at your machines!"
"I cannot help them," said the brain of Metropolis. "Nobody can help them. They are where they must be. They are what they must be. They are not fitted for anything more or anything different."
"I do not know for what they are fitted," said Freder, expressionlessly: his head fell upon his breast as though almost severed from his neck. "I only know what I saw — and that it was dreadful to look upon… I went through the machine-rooms — they were like temples. All the great gods were living in white temples. I saw Baal and Moloch, Huitziopochtli and Durgha; some frightfully companionable, some terribly solitary. I saw Juggernaut's divine car and the Towers of Silence, Mahomet's curved sword, and the crosses of Golgotha. And all machines, machines, machines, which, confined to their pedestals, like deities to their temple thrones, from the resting places which bore them, lived their god — Like lives: Eyeless but seeing all, earless but hearing all, without speech, yet, in themselves, a proclaiming mouth — not man, not woman, and yet engendering, receptive, and productive — lifeless, yet shaking the air of their temples with the never-expiring breath of their vitality. And, near the god-machines, the slaves of the god-machines: the men who were as though crushed between machine companionability and ma chine solitude. They have no loads to carry: the machine carries the loads. They have not to lift and push: the machine lifts and pushes. They have nothing else to do but eternally one and the same thing, each in this place, each at his machine. Divided into periods of brief seconds, always the same clutch at the same second, at the same second. They have eyes, but they are blind but for one thing, the scale of the manometer. They have ears, but they are deaf but for one thing, the hiss of their machine. They watch and watch, having no thought but for one thing: should their watchfulness waver, then the machine awakens from its feigned sleep and begins to race, racing itself to pieces. And the machine, having neither head nor brain, with the tension of its watchfulness, sucks and sucks out the brain from the paralysed skull of its watchman, and does not stay, and sucks, and does not stay until a being is hanging to the sucked-out skull, no longer a man and not yet a machine, pumped dry, hollowed out, used up. And the machine which has sucked out and gulped down the spinal marrow and brain of the man and has wiped out the hollows in his skull with the soft, long tongue of its soft, long hissing, the maching gleams in its silver-velvet radiance, anointed with oil, beautiful, infallible — Baal and Moloch, Huitzilopochtli and Durgha. And you, father, you press your fingers upon the little blue metal plate near your right hand, and your great glorious, dreadful city of Metropolis roars out, proclaiming that she is hungry for fresh human marrow and human brain and then the living food rolls on, like a stream, into the machine-rooms, which are like temples, and that, just used, is thrown up… "
His voice failed him. He struck his fists violently together, and looked at his father.
"And they are all human beings!"
"Unfortunately. Yes."
The father's voice sounded to the son's ear as though he were speaking from behind seven closed doors.
"That men are used up so rapidly at the machines, Freder, is no proof of the greed of the machine, but of the deficiency of the human material. Man is the product of change, Freder. A once-and-for-all being. If he is miscast he cannot be sent back to the melting-furnace. One is obliged to use him as he is. Whereby it has been statistically proved that the powers of performance of the non-intellectual worker lessen from month to month."
Freder laughed. The laugh came so dry, so parched, from his lips that Joh Fredersen jerked up his head, looking: at his son from out narrowed eyelids. Slowly his eyebrows! rose.
"Are you not afraid, father (supposing that the statistics are correct and the consumption of man is progressing increasingly, rapidly) that one fine day there will be no more food there for the man-eating god-machines, and that the Moloch of glass, rubber and steel, the Durgha of aluminium with platinum veins, will have to starve miserably?"
"The case is conceivable," said the brain of Metropolis.
"And then?"
"Then," said the brain of Metropolis, "by then a substitute for man will have to have been found."
"The improved man, you mean—? The machine-man—?"
"Perhaps," said the brain of Metropolis.
Freder brushed the damp hair from his brow. He bent forward, his breath touching his father.
"Then just listen to one thing, father," he breathed, the veins on his temples standing out, blue, "see to it that the machine-man has no head, or, at any rate, no face, or give him a face which always smiles. Or a Harlequin's face, or a closed visor. That it does not horrify one to look at him! For, as I walked through the machine-rooms to-day, I saw the men who watch your machines. And they know me, and I greeted them, one after the other. But not one returned my greeting. The machines were all too eagerly tautening their nerve-strings. And when I looked at them, father, quite closely, as closely as I am now looking at you—! was looking myself in the face… Every single man, father, who slaves at your machines, has my face — has the face of your son… "
"Then mine too, Freder, for we are very like each other," said the Master over the great Metropolis. He looked at the clock and stretched out his hand. In all the rooms surrounding the brain-pan of the New Tower of Babel the white lamps flared up.
"And doesn't it fill you with horror," asked the son, "to know so many shadows, so many phantoms, to be working at your work?"
"The time of horror lies behind me, Freder."
Then Freder turned and went, like a blind man — first missing the door with groping hand, then finding it. It opened before him. It closed behind him, and he stood still, in a room that seemed to him to be strange and icy.
Forms rose up from the chairs upon which they had sat, waiting, bowing low to the son of Joh Fredersen, the Master of Metropolis.