Page:Avon Fantasy Reader 10.djvu/74

 The dream of the Technocrats—a group of pseudo-scientists and engineers who held forth in 1932-33—seemed about to be fulfilled.

"But when the Mentanicals struck, the whole fabric of this new system swayed, tottered. Food ceased coming into the cities, distribution of food supplies stopped. Not at first did starvation threaten. Men and women fetched food from the supply depots. But in a few weeks these depots were emptied of their contents. Then famine threatened, not alone in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Montreal, but in the great cities of Europe. The strange, the weird thing about it all was that men were still able to talk to one another from city to city. Boston spoke to Los Angeles, and Buda-Pest to Warsaw. Listeners tuned in with receiving sets, speakers broadcasted through microphones and the newly improved television-cabinet; but the grim spectre of want soon drove them from those instruments, and, in the end, city was cut off from city, and country was separated from country.

"But before that happened man talked of subduing the Mentanicals, scarcely realizing as yet his utter helplessness in the face of their aloofness; but the Mentanicals came and went, whispering, gliding, indifferent to his plotting and planning. Then man went mad; he sought to destroy the things of his own creation. The machine, it was cried, had evolved too far; the machine must be annihilated. So starving millions sought to fall upon the machines and tear them to pieces. All over the civilized world they attempted this, but without weapons or tools of any kind, the attempt was doomed to failure. A few Mentanicals were destroyed, a few automatic devices, but the power was with the ensouled machine and the onslaughts of man were repulsed with comparative ease.

"Those terrible times! How can I ever forget them! I was but thirty-three and newly married. Marna said breathlessly, 'Why can't we strike at the root of all this?'

"'How?'

"'By attacking the factories that produce the Mentanicals, the powerhouses from which they derive their energy.'

"'Listen,' I cried.

"From the street rose the panic-stricken cries of the mob, the shrill blare of alarms. Marna shuddered. Morrow entered the room, breathing heavily, his clothes torn, disordered. 'God,' he said, 'they've beaten us back! There's no getting at them!'

"'The wages of sloth,' I said, 'of greed.'

"'What do you mean?'

"'Nothing,' I said; but I remembered that speech of Denson's fifteen years before—I was only a youngster then—the speech he gave a month before his arrest and execution: 'Man waxes great by his control of the machine; rightly utilized it is a source of leisure and plenty for the race. But rob him of that control, evict him from the industrial process, allow the machine to be monopolized by a class, and his doom is certain.'