she knew several thousand people and gave her son five minutes
The room is hexagonal, like one cell of a honeycomb, and it has no window and no lamp. In the middle is an armchair, and in the armchair a woman about five feet tall with a face as white as a fungus. Her name is Vashti. Music is playing. Then an electric bell rings, she switches the music off, and the chair rolls her across the floor to see who it is.
She is irritable about it. She knows several thousand people. But the voice in the receiver is her son's, so she softens and works it out aloud. Nothing important is likely to happen in the next five minutes. He can have fully five minutes. Then she has a lecture to give on music during the Australian period.
She presses the isolation knob so nobody else can get through and waits for the round plate in her hands to warm. It takes fifteen seconds, which she tells him is slow. A blue light crosses it and there is Kuno, who lives on the other side of the earth.
He wants her to come and see him. She asks why he could not have sent that by pneumatic post. She can see him already, so what more does he want. He says the plate shows him something like her, and the telephone lets him hear something like her, and he wants her and not the likeness. Then he says a word against the Machine, and she hushes him. One mustn't.
He wants to walk on the surface of the earth. She says it is contrary to the spirit of the age. His picture fades. He has isolated himself. For a moment she is lonely, and then she brings the lights up and the sight of the room steadies her: a hot bath button that raises a basin of imitation marble out of the floor, and the buttons for her friends. The room contains nothing and is in touch with everything she cares about.
She switches isolation off and the last three minutes arrive at once, bells and speaking tubes together. What is the new food like. Has she had any ideas lately. The food is horrible, she tells them, and she has no ideas of her own. Then she delivers the lecture from her chair, ten minutes, to an audience in their chairs, and it is well received.
E. M. Forster was thirty when he wrote this. It ran in the Oxford and Cambridge Review in November 1909, and he said much later that it was a reply to one of H. G. Wells's early heavens. In bed that night she takes the one book in the room off its stand. The Book of the Machine, richly bound, tells her which button to press for every contingency. She glances round as if someone might be watching, then kisses it three times and bows her head three times. Then she turns to page 1367, which lists the air-ship departures from her island to his. She reads it and thinks she has not the time.
She goes in the end, two days by air-ship. At dawn the blind in her cabin flies up and the sun comes down the wall like a tide. She flinches from it and the attendant puts out a hand to stop her falling. Vashti tells her she forgets herself. People stopped touching one another some generations back.
Kuno's room is identical to hers, down to the Book on its stand. He found a way out on his own, up an old workmen's ventilation shaft, on a ladder that cut his hands open. The hum of the Machine faded as he climbed and the silence above it hurt his ears. He came out into a hollow in Wessex, grass with ferns at the rim, and saw low colourless hills, and a belt of mist between his hill and the next the colour of pearl. Then the Mending Apparatus came up the shaft after him, long white worms that dragged him back under. She decides he is mad. She leaves, and does not see his face again.
Years pass. He is moved, she hears, to a room not far from hers, and they do not speak. Then one day the bell rings and it is him. He refuses to put his face on the plate and says out of the dark, "The Machine stops." She laughs at him, and he is angry, and that is the end of the call. To a friend she calls it impious. The friend asks whether he meant the trouble there has been with the music. Of course not, she says. Let us talk about music.
The trouble with the music is a gasping sigh at the crisis of the Brisbane symphonies, like someone in pain. The Committee of the Mending Apparatus says it will be remedied shortly, and that her complaint will be forwarded in its turn. After a while the sigh is part of the melody. The artificial fruit goes mouldy, the bath water begins to stink, and each is complained of bitterly and then accepted. One day the beds fail to appear when summoned, everywhere on earth at once, and the Mending Apparatus admits it is itself in need of repair.
Then, with no warning at all, the whole communication system goes down. Vashti is lecturing. The applause thins and at the end there is none. She calls a friend who is a specialist in sympathy. She calls the next friend and the next. Only then does she notice the silence. She has never heard it. The hum has been in her ears since the day she was born, and its absence sends pain across her skull. It kills many thousands of people outright.
The door of her cell works on a plain hinge, so it still opens. The tunnel outside is full of people crawling in the dark and touching one another. She shuts it and waits. The light ebbs. She whirls in the dark, kissing the Book and hitting button after button with bleeding hands, and by chance she hits the one that opens the door.
Where are you, she says. His voice says here. Is there any hope. None for us. She crawls toward him over the bodies of the dead, and his blood runs over her hands, and he tells her that they are touching and talking and not through the Machine. He kisses her. It is the first time anyone in the story has kissed anyone.
He got his five minutes.
The painting: Caspar David Friedrich, Woman at a Window (1822), Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Public domain.
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