f
side streets. I didn't notice particularly where we were going, because
I was utterly absorbed in everything Melbourne said. The city, along the
upper part of the Drive, is filled with streets that twist and turn
crookedly, like New York's Greenwich Village. It has always puzzled me
to know how the residents ever find their way home at night--especially
when they are returning from parties. I suppose they manage it
somehow--perhaps by signs cut in the trees, like primitive Indians.

"Even after I had worked out the machine," Melbourne continued, "it was
a year's job to put together a record for a thorough trial. That was a
matter of synchronization like your talking pictures, except that
everything had to be synchronized--taste touch as well as sound and
vision. And thought-processes had to be included. I had this advantage,
however--that I could record everything by a process of pure
imagination, as I shall explain later, just as everything is received
directly through the mind. And I worked out a way of going back and
cutting out the extraneous impressions. Even so, it was all amazingly
complicated.

"I've gotten around the difficulties of this, my first record, by
avoiding a story of ordinary life. Indeed, what I have made is hardly a
story at all. You can readily see how hard it would have been to use the
medley of noises in traffic, or the infinite variety of subtle
country-sounds. Instead, I made a story of an ideal life as I have
visioned it--the future, if you like, or the life on another planet."

At this moment we turned into a dark driveway and skirted a large lawn
for several hundred yards, up to Melbourne's home. It was a large
house, dark at the moment, like the colonial houses you see in
Virginia--the real ones, not the recent imitations that consist of
little except the spotless white columns, which Jefferson adopted from
the Greeks.

* * * * *

We went up some steps to a wide porch as the taxi drove away, and
Melbourne unlocked the door. The hall inside was a hint of quiet, fine
furnishings, with the note of simplicity that marks real taste.
Melbourne himself took my hat, and put it away meticulously with his own
in a cloak-room at the end of the hall. Then he led me up the stairs,
deeply carpeted, to his study. I glanced around the study with interest,
but I saw nothing that could, conceivably, have been what he called the
Chamber of Life.

"It's not here, Mr. B