hanging at two thousand feet over an oblong
block of incandescence in the centre of the little town.

'That looks like the old City Hall. Yes, there's Salati's Statue in
front of it,' said Takahira. 'But what on earth are they doing to the
place? I thought they used it for a market nowadays! Drop a
little, please.'

We could hear the sputter and crackle of road-surfacing machines--the
cheap Western type which fuse stone and rubbish into lava-like ribbed
glass for their rough country roads. Three or four surfacers worked on
each side of a square of ruins. The brick and stone wreckage crumbled,
slid forward, and presently spread out into white-hot pools of sticky
slag, which the levelling-rods smoothed more or less flat. Already a
third of the big block had been so treated, and was cooling to dull red
before our astonished eyes.

'It is the Old Market,' said De Forest. 'Well, there's nothing to
prevent Illinois from making a road through a market. It doesn't
interfere with traffic, that I can see.'

'Hsh!' said Arnott, gripping me by the shoulder. 'Listen! They're
singing. Why on the earth are they singing?'

We dropped again till we could see the black fringe of people at the
edge of that glowing square.

At first they only roared against the roar of the surfacers and
levellers. Then the words came up clearly--the words of the Forbidden
Song that all men knew, and none let pass their lips--poor Pat
MacDonough's Song, made in the days of the Crowds and the Plague--every
silly word of it loaded to sparking-point with the Planet's inherited
memories of horror, panic, fear and cruelty. And Chicago--innocent,
contented little Chicago--was singing it aloud to the infernal tune that
carried riot, pestilence and lunacy round our Planet a few
generations ago!

'Once there was The People--Terror gave it birth;
Once there was The People, and it made a hell of earth!'

(Then the stamp and pause):

'Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, oh, ye slain!
Once there was The People--it shall never be again!'

The levellers thrust in savagely against the ruins as the song renewed
itself again, again and again, louder than the crash of the
melting walls.

De Forest frowned.

'I don't like that,' he said. 'They've broken back to the Old Days!
They'll be killing somebody soon. I think we'd better divert
'em, Arnott.'

'Ay, ay, sir.' Arnott's hand went to his cap, and we heard the hull of
the _Victor Pirolo