The Machine Stops (adapted), E. M. Forster
The Machine Stops (adapted)
E. M. Forster
Category: Short Stories
Genres: Science fiction,Dystopian
Level 3.441:30 h41.7 mb
In the future, people live alone in small rooms underground. They depend on a great system called the Machine, which gives them everything they need. A woman named Vashti is happy with this life. But her son Kuno feels different. He wants to see the real world outside and does not trust the Machine. As time passes, the Machine begins to have problems. Kuno tries to warn others, but most people do not listen... This is an adapted version of the story, simplified to A2 level.

The Machine Stops

[adapted]

by
E. M. Forster

The Machine Stops (adapted)

The Air Ship

Imagine, if you can, a small room, six-sided, like a bee’s cell. It has no window or lamp, yet it is full of soft light. There are no openings for air, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, yet, as my thoughts begin, the room is full of sweet music. An armchair is in the centre, and next to it a reading-desk — that is all the furniture.

And in the armchair sits a wrapped-up bundle — a woman, about five feet tall, with a face as white as a mushroom. This little room belongs to her.

An electric bell rang. The woman pressed a switch and the music stopped.
‘I must see who it is’, she thought, and made her chair move.
The chair, like the music, was run by a machine and it rolled her to the other side of the room, where the bell was still ringing.

‘Who is it?’ she called. Her voice was annoyed, for she had been stopped many times since the music started. She knew thousands of people; in some ways, contact between people had improved a lot. But when she listened to the receiver, she smiled, and she said: ‘Very well. Let’s talk, I will be alone. I don’t think anything important will happen for the next five minutes — I can give you a full five minutes, Kuno. Then I must give my talk on “Music during the Australian Period”.’

She touched the private switch, so that no one else could speak to her. Then she touched the light switch, and the little room went dark.
‘Be quick!’ she called, her anger coming back. ‘Be quick, Kuno; here I am in the dark wasting my time.’

But it was a full fifteen seconds before the round plate that she held in her hands began to light up. A faint blue light went across it, turning to purple, and soon she could see the picture of her son, who lived on the other side of the world, and he could see her.

‘Kuno, how slow you are.’
He smiled seriously.
‘I really believe you enjoy wasting time.’
‘I have called you before, mother, but you were always busy or alone. I have something special to say.’

‘What is it, dear boy? Be quick. Why couldn’t you send it by tube post?’
‘Because I prefer to say it. I want — ’
‘Well?’
‘I want you to come and see me.’

Vashti watched his face in the blue plate.
‘But I can see you!’ she said. ‘What more do you want?’
‘I want to see you not through the Machine,’ said Kuno. ‘I want to speak to you not through the boring Machine.’
‘Oh, be quiet!’ said his mother, a little shocked. ‘You mustn’t say anything bad about the Machine.’
‘Why not?’
‘You must not.’

‘You talk as if a god made the Machine,’ said the other. ‘I think that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is important, but it is not everything. I see something like you on this screen, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Come and see me, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.’

She answered that she could not find much time for a visit.
‘The airship just takes two days to fly between us.’
‘I do not like airships.’
‘Why?’

‘I do not like seeing the ugly brown ground, and the sea, and the stars when it is dark. I get no ideas in an airplane.’
‘I do not get them anywhere else.’
‘What kind of ideas can the air give you?’

He stopped for a moment. ‘Do you know four big stars that make a rectangle, and three stars close together in the middle of the rectangle, and, hanging from these stars, three other stars?’
‘No, I do not. I do not like the stars. But did they give you an idea? How interesting; tell me.’
‘I had an idea that they were like a man.’

‘I do not understand.’
‘The four big stars are the man’s shoulders and his knees. The three stars in the middle are like the belts that men wore in the past, and the three stars hanging are like a sword.’

‘A sword?’
‘Men carried swords with them, to kill animals and other men.’
‘It does not seem to me a very good idea, but it is certainly new. When did you first think of it?’
‘In the airship — ’ He stopped, and she thought that he looked sad.

She could not be sure, for the Machine did not send small details of expression. It only gave a general idea of people — an idea that was good enough for all everyday needs, Vashti thought. The delicate bloom, said by an idea that people did not trust to be the main part of talk between people, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the delicate bloom of the grape was ignored by the makers of artificial fruit. Something ‘good enough’ had been accepted long ago by our people.

‘The truth is,’ he said, ‘that I want to see these stars again. They are strange stars. I want to see them not from the air-ship, but from the surface of the earth, as the people before us did, thousands of years ago. I want to visit the surface of the earth.’

She was surprised again.
‘Mother, you must come, even just to explain to me what the danger is of going to the surface of the earth.’

‘No harm,’ she replied, keeping calm. ‘But no use. The ground is only dust and mud, no use. The ground is only dust and mud, no life is on it, and you would need a mask to breathe, or the cold air outside would kill you. People die right away in the outside air.’

‘I know; of course I will be careful.’
‘And also — ’
‘Well?’
She thought, and chose her words carefully. Her son had a strange temper, and she wanted to stop him from going on the trip.
‘It is against the spirit of the time,’ she said.

‘Do you mean by that, against the Machine?’
‘In a way, but — ’
His image in the blue plate went away.
‘Kuno!’
He had shut himself off.

For a moment Vashti felt lonely. Then she turned on the light, and the sight of her room, filled with bright light and covered with electric buttons, made her feel better. There were buttons and switches everywhere — buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressing it a tub of fake marble rose out of the floor, filled to the top with a warm liquid with no smell.

There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that made books. And there were, of course, the buttons she used to talk with her friends. The room, even though it had nothing in it, was connected to everything she cared about in the world.

Vashanti’s next step was to turn off the switch that kept her alone, and everything that had built up in the last three minutes came to her at once. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and tubes for speaking. What was the new food like? Could she say it was good? Has she had any ideas lately? Could people tell her their own ideas? Would she make an appointment to visit the public nurseries soon? — say one month from today.

To most of these questions she answered in an annoyed way — a feeling that was becoming more common in that fast age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public baby rooms because she had too many things to do. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one — that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she did not think it meant much.

Then she turned off her contacts, for it was time to give her talk on Australian music. The bad system of public meetings had been left behind long ago; neither Vashti nor her listeners moved from their rooms. Sitting in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, well enough, and saw her, well enough.

She began with a funny story about music in the time before the Mongols, and then described the big burst of singing that came after the Chinese took over. Though the methods of I-San-So and the Brisbane school were very old and simple, she still felt (she said) that studying them might help the musicians of today: they were fresh; they had, most of all, ideas.

Her talk, which lasted ten minutes, was liked, and at the end she and many of the people listening listened to a talk about the sea; there were ideas to get from the sea; the speaker had put on a breathing mask and visited it not long ago. Then she ate, talked to many friends, had a bath, talked again, and called her bed.

She did not like the bed. It was too large, and she liked a small bed. Complaining was useless, for beds were of the same size all over the world, and to have a different size would have needed huge changes in the Machine. Vashti stayed alone — it was necessary, because there was no day or night under the ground — and thought about all that had happened since she last called the bed. Ideas? Hardly any. Events — was Kuno’s invitation an event?

By her side, on the little reading-desk, was something that had lasted from the old times of mess — one book. This was the Book of the Machine. In it were instructions for every possible problem. If she was hot or cold or had an upset stomach or could not find a word, she went to the book, and it told her which button to press. The Central Committee published it. As was becoming a habit, it had a rich cover.

Sitting up in the bed, she took it with respect in her hands. She looked around the glowing room as if some one might be watching her. Then, half ashamed, half joyful, she said softly ‘O Machine! O Machine!’ and raised the book to her lips. Three times she kissed it, three times she bowed her head, three times she felt the dizzy joy of giving in.

After she finished her ritual, she turned to page 1367, which showed the times when the air-ships left from the island in the southern half of the world, under which she lived, to the island in the northern half of the world, under which her son lived.
She thought, ‘I do not have the time.’

She made the room dark and slept; she woke up and made the room light; she ate and talked with her friends, and listened to music and went to lectures; she made the room dark and slept. Above her, below her, and around her, the Machine hummed all the time; she did not notice the noise, because she had been born with it in her ears. The earth, carrying her, hummed as it moved fast through silence, turning her now to the invisible sun, now to the invisible stars.

She woke up and turned on the light.
‘Kuno!’
‘I will not talk to you,’ he answered, ‘until you come.’
‘Have you been outside on the earth since we last spoke?’
His picture went away.

Again she looked at the book. She became very nervous and lay back in her chair with her heart beating fast. Think of her with no teeth or hair. Soon she moved the chair to the wall, and pressed a button she did not know. The wall opened slowly. Through the opening she saw a tunnel that turned a little, so that its end could not be seen. If she went to see her son, this was the start of the journey.

Of course she knew all about the communication system. There was nothing strange in it. She would call a car and it would take her down the tunnel until it reached the lift that connected to the air-ship station: the system had been used for many, many years, long before the Machine was set up everywhere.

And of course she had studied the society that had come just before her own — the society that did not understand what the system was for, and had used it to bring people to things, instead of to bring things to people. Those funny old days, when men went for a change of air instead of changing the air in their rooms!

And yet — she was frightened of the tunnel: she had not seen it since her last child was born. It bent — but not quite as she remembered; it was bright — but not quite as bright as a teacher had said. Vashti felt the fear of real experience. She stepped back into the room, and the wall closed up again.

‘Kuno,’ she said, ‘I cannot come to see you. I am not well.’
At once a very big machine came down on her from the ceiling, a thermometer was put on her heart by itself. She lay unable to move. Cool pads made her forehead feel better. Kuno had sent a telegram to her doctor.

So the human feelings still went up and down in the Machine. Vashti drank the medicine that the doctor squirted into her mouth, and the machinery went back into the ceiling. Kuno’s voice was heard asking how she felt.

‘Better.’ Then, angrily: ‘But why don’t you come to me instead?’
‘Because I cannot leave this place.’
‘Why?’
‘Because, any moment, something very big may happen.’

‘Have you been on the ground of the earth yet?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘I will not tell you through the Machine.’

She went on with her life. But she thought of Kuno as a baby, his birth, his being taken to the public nurseries, her own visit to him there, his visits to her — visits which stopped when the Machine had given him a room on the other side of the earth. ‘Parents, responsibilities of,’ said the book of the Machine,’ end at the moment of birth. P.422327483.’

True, but there was something special about Kuno — in fact there had been something special about all her children — and, after all, she must make the trip if he wanted it. And ‘something very big might happen’. What did that mean? The silly talk of a young man, no doubt, but she must go. Again she pressed the strange button, again the wall swung back, and she saw the tunnel that bends out of sight. Clasping the Book, she rose, tottered on to the platform, and summoned the car. Her room closed behind her: the journey to the northern half of the world had begun.

Of course it was perfectly easy. The car came near and in it she found armchairs exactly like her own. When she signalled, it stopped, and she walked with difficulty into the lift. One other passenger was in the lift, the first other person she had seen face to face for months. Few travelled in these days, because, thanks to science, the earth was exactly the same everywhere.

Quick travel and communication, from which the earlier society had expected so much, ended up hurting itself. What was the point of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men rarely moved their bodies; all worry was kept in the mind.

The air-ship service was a leftover from an earlier time. It was kept running, because it was easier to keep it running than to stop it or to reduce it, but it now was much more than the people needed. Airship after airship would rise from the exits of Rye or of Christchurch (I use the old names), would sail into the crowded sky, and would stop at the docks of the south — empty.

So well arranged was the system, so not changed by the weather, that the sky, whether calm or cloudy, looked like a huge changing pattern on which the same patterns came back at regular times. The ship on which Vashti sailed started sometimes at sunset, sometimes at dawn. But always, as it passed above Rheas, it would be next to the ship that went between Helsingfors and the Brazils, and, every third time it went over the Alps, the group of ships from Palermo would cross its path behind it.

Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, no longer stopped man. He had tamed the great monster. All the old books, with their love of Nature, and their fear of Nature, seemed as false as the talk of a child.

But as Vashti saw the big side of the ship, stained by the outside air, her fear of real experience came back. It was not quite like the air-ship in the film. For one thing it smelled — not strong or unpleasant, but it did smell, and with her eyes closed she would have known that a new thing was close to her. Then she had to walk to it from the lift, had to put up with looks from the other passengers.

The man in front dropped his Book — not a big thing, but it worried them all. In the rooms, if the Book was dropped, the floor raised it by machine, but the walkway to the air-ship was not prepared like that, and the holy Book lay still. They stopped — the thing was not expected — and the man, instead of picking up his Book, felt the muscles of his arm to see why they had not worked.

Then some one actually said out loud: ‘We will be late’ — and they got on board, Vashti stepping on the pages as she did so.

Inside, her worry grew. The setup was old-fashioned and rough. There was even a female attendant, and she would have to tell her what she wanted during the trip. Of course a moving platform ran the length of the boat, but she was expected to walk from it to her cabin. Some cabins were better than others, and she did not get the best. She thought the attendant had been unfair, and fits of anger shook her.

The glass doors had closed, she could not go back. She saw, at the end of the hall, the lift in which she had gone up going quietly up and down, empty. Under those hallways of shiny tiles were rooms, level below level, going far down into the ground, and in each room there sat a person, eating, or sleeping, or thinking of ideas. And hidden deep in the hive was her own room.