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“Yes,” said Adam. “More grown-up than you’ve ever seen before, I reckon.”
“Fightin’ grownups is never any use,” said Wensleydale gloomily. “You always get into trouble.”
“You don’t have to fight ’em,” said Adam. “You just do what I told you.”
The Them looked at the things they were carrying. As far as tools to mend the world were concerned, they did not look incredibly efficient.
“How’ll we find ’em, then?” said Brian, doubtfully. “I remember when we came to the Open Day, it’s all rooms and stuff. Lots of rooms and flashing lights.”
Adam stared thoughtfully at the buildings. The alarms were still yodeling.
“Well,” he said, “it seems to me—”
“Hey, what are you kids doing here?”
It wasn’t a one hundred percent threatening voice, but it was near the end of its tether and it belonged to an officer who’d spent ten minutes trying to make sense of a senseless world where alarms went off and doors didn’t open. Two equally harassed soldiers stood behind him, slightly at a loss as to how to deal with four short and clearly Caucasian juveniles, one of them marginally female.
“Don’t you worry about us,” said Adam airily. “We’re jus’ lookin’ around.”
“Now you just—” the lieutenant began.
“Go to sleep,” said Adam. “You just go to sleep. All you soldiers here go to sleep. Then you won’t get hurt. You all just go to sleep now.”
The lieutenant stared at him, his eyes trying to focus. Then he pitched forward.
“Coo,” said Pepper, as the others collapsed, “how did you do that?”
“Well,” said Adam cautiously, “you know that bit about hypnotism in the Boy’s Own Book of 101 Things To Do that we could never make work?”
“Yes?”
“Well, it’s sort of like that, only now I’ve found how to do it.” He turned back to the communications building.
He pulled himself together, his body unfolding from its habitual comfortable slouch into an upright bearing Mr. Tyler would have been proud of.
“Right,” he said.
He thought for a while.
Then he said, “Come and see.”
IF YOU TOOK THE WORLD away and just left the electricity, it would look like the most exquisite filigree ever made—a ball of twinkling silver lines with the occasional coruscating spike of a satellite beam. Even the dark areas would glow with radar and commercial radio waves. It could be the nervous system of a great beast.
Here and there cities make knots in the web but most of the electricity is, as it were, mere musculature, concerned only with crude work. But for fifty years or so people had been giving electricity brains.
And now it was alive, in the same way that fire is alive. Switches were welding shut. Relays fused. In the heart of silicon chips whose microscopic architecture looked like a street plan of Los Angeles fresh pathways opened up, and hundreds of miles away bells rang in underground rooms and men stared in horror at what certain screens were telling them. Heavy steel doors shut firmly in secret hollow mountains, leaving people on the other side to pound on them and wrestle with fuse boxes which had melted. Bits of desert and tundra slid aside, letting fresh air into air-conditioned tombs, and blunt shapes ground ponderously into position.
And while it flowed where it should not, it ebbed from its normal beds. In cities the traffic lights went, then the street lights, then all the lights. Cooling fans slowed, flickered, and stopped. Heaters faded into darkness. Lifts stuck. Radio stations choked off, their soothing music silenced.
It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.
Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not.
There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic—hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants.
DEATH STRAIGHTENED UP. He appeared to be listening intently. It was anyone’s guess what he listened with.
HE IS HERE, he said.
