CHAPTER VI

THE HALL OF THE ATLAS

From the moment when the tailor had bowed his farewell to the moment when Graham found himself in the lift, was altogether barely five minutes.  As yet the haze of his vast interval of sleep hung about him, as yet the initial strangeness of his being alive at all in this remote age touched everything with wonder, with a sense of the irrational, with something of the quality of a realistic dream.  He was still detached, an astonished spectator, still but half involved in life.  What he had seen, and especially the last crowded tumult, framed in the setting of the balcony, had a spectacular turn, like a thing witnessed from the box of a theatre.  “I don’t understand,” he said.  “What was the trouble?  My mind is in a whirl.  Why were they shouting?  What is the danger?”

“We have our troubles,” said Howard.  His eyes avoided Graham’s enquiry.  “This is a time of unrest.  And, in fact, your appearance, your waking just now, has a sort of connexion—­”

He spoke jerkily, like a man not quite sure of his breathing.  He stopped abruptly.

“I don’t understand,” said Graham.

“It will be clearer later,” said Howard.

He glanced uneasily upward, as though he found the progress of the lift slow.

“I shall understand better, no doubt, when I have seen my way about a little,” said Graham puzzled.  “It will be—­it is bound to be perplexing.  At present it is all so strange.  Anything seems possible.  Anything.  In the details even.  Your counting, I understand, is different.”

The lift stopped, and they stepped out into a narrow but very long passage between high walls, along which ran an extraordinary number of tubes and big cables.

“What a huge place this is!” said Graham.  “Is it all one building?  What place is it?”

“This is one of the city ways for various public services.  Light and so forth.”

“Was it a social trouble—­that—­in the great roadway place?  How are you governed?  Have you still a police?”

“Several,” said Howard.

“Several?”

“About fourteen.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Very probably not.  Our social order will probably seem very complex to you.  To tell you the truth, I don’t understand it myself very clearly.  Nobody does.  You will, perhaps—­bye and bye.  We have to go to the Council.”

Graham’s attention was divided between the urgent necessity of his inquiries and the people in the passages and halls they were traversing.  For a moment his mind would be concentrated upon Howard and the halting answers he made, and then he would lose the thread in response to some vivid unexpected impression.  Along the passages, in the halls, half the people seemed to be men in the red uniform.  The pale blue canvas that had been so abundant in the aisle of moving ways did not appear.  Invariably these men looked at him, and saluted him and Howard as they passed.