“Where are the street cars and the motors?”
“Oh, done away with long ago,” he said; “how awful they must have been.
The noise of them!” and his asbestos clothes rustled with a shudder.
“But how do you get about?”
“We don’t,” he answered. “Why should we? It’s just the same being here
as being anywhere else.” He looked at me with an infinity of dreariness
in his face.
A thousand questions surged into my mind at once. I asked one of the
simplest.
“But how do you get back and forwards to your work?”
“Work!” he said. “There isn’t any work. It’s finished. The last of it
was all done centuries ago.”
I looked at him a moment open-mouthed. Then I turned and looked again
at the grey desolation of the street with the asbestos figures moving
here and there.
I tried to pull my senses together. I realised that if I was to unravel
this new and undreamed-of future, I must go at it systematically and
step by step.
“I see,” I said after a pause, “that momentous things have happened
since my time. I wish you would let me ask you about it all
systematically, and would explain it to me bit by bit. First, what do
you mean by saying that there is no work?”
“Why,” answered my strange acquaintance, “it died out of itself.
Machinery killed it. If I remember rightly, you had a certain amount of
machinery even in your time. You had done very well with steam, made a
good beginning with electricity, though I think radial energy had
hardly as yet been put to use.”