THREE DAYS

Graham wants another flight before he wants another political briefing.

Lincoln meets him beneath the stage and encourages the enthusiasm. If Graham wishes, the aeronauts can formally recognise him and allow further training.

When Graham asks how the revolution is progressing, Lincoln dismisses the question. Everything is settling down. Ostrog has affairs in hand.

The answer sounds reassuring because Graham wants it to be.

He asks for immediate instruction and returns to his apartments thinking about air, engines and control surfaces rather than strikes, promises or the dead.

The future supplies unlimited distraction.

Models and working examples of machinery are brought to him: counting devices, construction systems, spinning engines, elevators, agricultural machines and mechanisms for communication.

Cigars, now rare, are located in Florida and sent by pneumatic dispatch because the Master has expressed a preference.

Practical psychologists demonstrate forms of hypnosis used in medicine, education and concentration.

Every desire produces a service. Every question produces another marvel.

Graham repeatedly calls his own century savage by comparison.

The remark is understandable. Machines have reduced physical effort, accelerated communication and expanded human ability.

Yet the demonstrations also reveal a pattern he does not examine closely enough.

Access depends on wealth. Skilled hypnotists, advanced education and personal freedom are available to those who can afford them.

The future's achievements are real; their distribution is political.

Entertainment arrives as well.

Dancers have been brought from Capri. Officials suggest a visit to a Pleasure City. Graham refuses some temptations and accepts others, including the company of fashionable people fascinated by the man from the past.

He remains in London partly because he enjoys identifying places that once belonged to his own life.

Where he waited beneath railway smoke, he now walks high in clean air. Where streets and stations stood, vast architectural levels now carry millions.

Outside his apartments, the situation is not settling down.

Workers refuse to surrender the weapons distributed during the revolt. Factories remain idle. The marching song that helped overthrow the Council is forbidden within the city.

Graham is told almost none of this.

Ostrog visits daily and reports only a little trouble here, a slight disturbance there.

The language reduces political resistance to maintenance.

The contrast between title and authority grows quietly.

Graham is Master of the Earth. Ostrog decides what information reaches him.

Graham can command a cigar from another continent. He does not know that a song sung in his name has been banned.

He can learn to control a flying machine. He is not yet controlling the government that claims to obey him.

Comfort is performing the same function as the locked door in the Silent Rooms, only more pleasantly.

By the second and third day, Helen returns to Graham's thoughts.

He remembers the urgency in her face and the warning she could not finish before Lincoln arrived.

Her seriousness begins to look different beside the polished evasions around him.

Machines no longer hold his attention completely.

He wants to know what she meant by oppression—and why nobody else is eager to discuss it.

Three days after their first conversation, Graham seeks Helen.

The delay has not been harmless. Ostrog has used it to consolidate administration and separate revolutionary victory from revolutionary expectation.

Graham has gained knowledge of machines and almost none of the people who operate them.

The next awakening will not be medical.

It will be political.