New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Time travel -- Fiction
My mind clung to Nanette. Cut off from us. No chance to get to her--it
would start the warfare, which of everything else I understood at once
was what this Council feared. There were mirrors here--and hundreds
more in the adjoining room--picturing present scenes all over the city,
and over the world. But none from the Turber area--that was insulated
against them.
How changed was this world from ours of 1945! Changed in every smallest
detail. Our familiar nations were gone. White, Yellow and Black
nations now, in a trinity of alliance. The White Nation was headed by
Anglo-Saxonia.
It was a vast world of business unified by transportation. There were
no ships, it seemed, on the seas, save perhaps locally in very small
areas. No great railroads. The age of the air.
Power was universally distributed by aerial vibrations. It was
broadcast by a central plant in Scotland. Transformers were at Niagara,
the Iguazu in South America, and Victoria Falls in Africa. The power
was tapped by air-liners; by the city trains; by the factories which
now were spread over every rural district; it operated all lights--all
motors down to the smallest.
* * * * *
There was now spread before us, in terms of this super-modern world,
the culmination of Turber's plans. There was a Turber Empire here now.
He had brought, with many trips of his aero, a constant stream of
villains gathered from the Past. How many thousands of them, we never
knew. And brought his treasure.
The city here knew him first as a wealthy man with a business
organization, buying up small sections of the city. His wealth and
his power grew, until now, ten years after his appearance in this
Time-world, he was a figure gigantic. He and his followers--his
organization--owned now all the southern area of the city. In ancient
terms: Staten Island--New York Harbor--a portion of Brooklyn--and
adjacent New Jersey.
Outside the city the Turberites owned and had colonized a strip of
land some twenty miles wide by six hundred miles long. Bought with
gold--like a gigantic railroad right-of-way. The strip ran from the
New Jersey edge of the city southward through New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Virginia, and into the Carolina Mountains. All ancient terms,
these, of course.
An agricultural section; and factories; and mines. A wall of metal and
masonry, huge as the old Great Wall of China, hemmed in this Turber
Colony. Food and all the supplies necessary to life were produced by
Turberites for their section of Great New York. They had organized
their own air transportation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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