“Have the Fashions gone,” I asked, “that insane, extravagant idea of——­” I was about to launch into one of my old-time harangues about the sheer vanity of decorative dress, when my eye rested on the moving figures in asbestos, and I stopped.

“All gone,” said the Man in Asbestos.  “Then next to that we killed, or practically killed, the changes of climate.  I don’t think that in your day you properly understood how much of your work was due to the shifts of what you called the weather.  It meant the need of all kinds of special clothes and houses and shelters, a wilderness of work.  How dreadful it must have been in your day—­wind and storms, great wet masses—­what did you call them?—­clouds—­flying through the air, the ocean full of salt, was it not?—­tossed and torn by the wind, snow thrown all over everything, hail, rain—­how awful!”

“Sometimes,” I said, “it was very beautiful.  But how did you alter it?”

“Killed the weather!” answered the Man in Asbestos.  “Simple as anything—­turned its forces loose one against the other, altered the composition of the sea so that the top became all more or less gelatinous.  I really can’t explain it, as it is an operation that I never took at school, but it made the sky grey, as you see it, and the sea gum-coloured, the weather all the same.  It cut out fuel and houses and an infinity of work with them!”

He paused a moment.  I began to realise something of the course of evolution that had happened.

“So,” I said, “the conquest of nature meant that presently there was no more work to do?”

“Exactly,” he said, “nothing left.”

“Food enough for all?”

“Too much,” he answered.

“Houses and clothes?”

“All you like,” said the Man in Asbestos, waving his hand.  “There they are.  Go out and take them.  Of course, they’re falling down—­ slowly, very slowly.  But they’ll last for centuries yet, nobody need bother.”

Then I realised, I think for the first time, just what work had meant in the old life, and how much of the texture of life itself had been bound up in the keen effort of it.

Presently my eyes looked upward:  dangling at the top of a moss-grown building I saw what seemed to be the remains of telephone wires.

“What became of all that,” I said, “the telegraph and the telephone and all the system of communication?”

“Ah,” said the Man in Asbestos, “that was what a telephone meant, was it?  I knew that it had been suppressed centuries ago.  Just what was it for?”

“Why,” I said with enthusiasm, “by means of the telephone we could talk to anybody, call up anybody, and talk at any distance.”