Page:Weird Tales Volume 10 Number 5 (1927-11).djvu/14

from our window yet well below it, since the Executive Building is the tallest in all the City, were other platforms, and as we talked there, watching, men and women and children, like monster bees, dropped from windows in their monopters, and glided across to this or that window in the Executive Building. All the windows wTere numbered or marked with other distinguishing signs. It was like this throughout the whole City, so that the great and awesome canyons between the buildings were fairly alive with flitting and industrious people, going about their mysterious business speedily and in silence.

Over the top of the building opposite I could see some of the other buildings, their spires glistening in the sun, now visible, now obscured as wraiths of white clouds, like fingers of some bodiless entity of space, moved into and along the canyons. Below the spires, many stories below, there often were clouds, shutting out the world beneath, so that at times, looking from this window, it was as though our building had been cut in twain somewhere below us, leaving us here in space, immovable. At such times as these the myriad noises of the City were muffled, as well they might be, when one considers the depth of the great canyons. But even then, when impenetrable fog held the whole city in its grip, the noises came up to us, even through the almost sound-proof walls of Sark Darlin's office. A vast, voiceless roar, as though some subterranean monster, imprisoned in a pit that was bottomless, cried out in agony at his restraint. But the clouds, white misty draperies, sent their tentacles into the canyons and paid no heed. While the clouds were passing through, it was always interesting to watch the monopters, each encasing a human being, stand upright on the platform, patiently waiting for the mists to lift or move on. With clouds in the canyons it wras virtually suicide to attempt a crossing from one platform to another. Sark Darlin, I knew, had all but perfected a device whereby monopters might be directed at will toward a fixed destination, but the purpose of the invention had been defeated because, among the mists, monopters might collide and their occupants be hurled to the depths. As we watched there, while I sensed, without looking, that the face of Sark Darlin was radiant with pardonable pride, the platforms opposite were fairly aswarm with monopters waiting for the mists to lift or clear. Like doves standing before their cotes. It was impossible, of course, to tell which were men and which were women. Not that it mattered, especially, for in the City of the East there is no difference between them, save the fundamental difference of sex, and women and men work side by side. Sark has told me, he having read extensively, that this was not so, long ago; but Sark is getting old, and I have never believed it. To me it is inconceivable that women were once considered to be of a lower order than men—or the other way around. My principal reason for loving the daughter of Darlin is that she can do everything that I can do.

"See, Gerd?" he pointed vaguely beyond the window. "The City of the East! The greatest city of all time! The realization of a dream of my first recorded ancestor. Would that he lived today to see his dream in truth as he must have seen it then in his mind! He promised himself, this dreamer-ancestor of mine, to dedicate his life to the building of this City which lies before you, and the tradition was passed on to his son, and from him to his son, and the line has never been broken. Only now is it threatened, because my time is coming. Lona is my only offspring.