“And anybody could call you up at any time and talk?” said the Man in Asbestos, with something like horror.  “How awful!  What a dreadful age yours was, to be sure.  No, the telephone and all the rest of it, all the transportation and intercommunication was cut out and forbidden.  There was no sense in it.  You see,” he added, “what you don’t realise is that people after your day became gradually more and more reasonable.  Take the railroad, what good was that?  It brought into every town a lot of people from every other town.  Who wanted them?  Nobody.  When work stopped and commerce ended, and food was needless, and the weather killed, it was foolish to move about.  So it was all terminated.  Anyway,” he said, with a quick look of apprehension and a change in his voice, “it was dangerous!”

“So!” I said.  “Dangerous!  You still have danger?”

“Why, yes,” he said, “there’s always the danger of getting broken.”

“What do you mean,” I asked.

“Why,” said the Man in Asbestos, “I suppose it’s what you would call being dead.  Of course, in one sense there’s been no death for centuries past; we cut that out.  Disease and death were simply a matter of germs.  We found them one by one.  I think that even in your day you had found one or two of the easier, the bigger ones?”

I nodded.

“Yes, you had found diphtheria and typhoid and, if I am right, there were some outstanding, like scarlet fever and smallpox, that you called ultra-microscopic, and which you were still hunting for, and others that you didn’t even suspect.  Well, we hunted them down one by one and destroyed them.  Strange that it never occurred to any of you that Old Age was only a germ!  It turned out to be quite a simple one, but it was so distributed in its action that you never even thought of it.”

“And you mean to say,” I ejaculated in amazement, looking at the Man in Asbestos, “that nowadays you live for ever?”

“I wish,” he said, “that you hadn’t that peculiar, excitable way of talking; you speak as if everything mattered so tremendously.  Yes,” he continued, “we live for ever, unless, of course, we get broken.  That happens sometimes.  I mean that we may fall over a high place or bump on something, and snap ourselves.  You see, we’re just a little brittle still—­some remnant, I suppose, of the Old Age germ—­and we have to be careful.  In fact,” he continued, “I don’t mind saying that accidents of this sort were the most distressing feature of our civilisation till we took steps to cut out all accidents.  We forbid all street cars, street traffic, aeroplanes, and so on.  The risks of your time,” he said, with a shiver of his asbestos clothes, “must have been awful.”

“They were,” I answered, with a new kind of pride in my generation that I had never felt before, “but we thought it part of the duty of brave people to——­”

“Yes, yes,” said the Man in Asbestos impatiently, “please don’t get excited.  I know what you mean.  It was quite irrational.”