As Easy as A.B.C - Page 2

height at top-speed from the first. That is why I found myself sitting
suddenly on the large lap of Eustace Arnott, who commands the A.B.C.
Fleet. One knows vaguely that there is such a thing as a Fleet somewhere
on the Planet, and that, theoretically, it exists for the purposes of
what used to be known as 'war.' Only a week before, while visiting a
glacier sanatorium behind Gothaven, I had seen some squadrons making
false auroras far to the north while they manoeuvred round the Pole;
but, naturally, it had never occurred to me that the things could be
used in earnest.

Said Arnott to De Forest as I staggered to a seat on the chart-room
divan: 'We're tremendously grateful to 'em in Illinois. We've never had
a chance of exercising all the Fleet together. I've turned in a General
Call, and I expect we'll have at least two hundred keels aloft
this evening.'

'Well aloft?' De Forest asked.

'Of course, sir. Out of sight till they're called for.'

Arnott laughed as he lolled over the transparent chart-table where the
map of the summer-blue Atlantic slid along, degree by degree, in exact
answer to our progress. Our dial already showed 320 m.p.h. and we were
two thousand feet above the uppermost traffic lines.

'Now, where is this Illinois District of yours?' said Dragomiroff. 'One
travels so much, one sees so little. Oh, I remember! It is in
North America.'

De Forest, whose business it is to know the out districts, told us that
it lay at the foot of Lake Michigan, on a road to nowhere in particular,
was about half an hour's run from end to end, and, except in one corner,
as flat as the sea. Like most flat countries nowadays, it was heavily
guarded against invasion of privacy by forced timber--fifty-foot spruce
and tamarack, grown in five years. The population was close on two
millions, largely migratory between Florida and California, with a
backbone of small farms (they call a thousand acres a farm in Illinois)
whose owners come into Chicago for amusements and society during the
winter. They were, he said, noticeably kind, quiet folk, but a little
exacting, as all flat countries must be, in their notions of privacy.
There had, for instance, been no printed news-sheet in Illinois for
twenty-seven years. Chicago argued that engines for printed news sooner
or later developed into engines for invasion of privacy, which in turn
might bring the old terror of Crowds and blackmail back to the Planet.
So news-sheets were not.

'And that's Illinois,' De Forest concluded. 'You see, in the Old Days,
she was in the forefront of what they used to call "progress," and
Chicago--'

'Chicago?' said Takahira. 'That's the little place where there is
Salati's Statue of the Nigger