the
apparatus broken....

He struck out a path oblique to the room and paced to and fro,
struggling with intolerable vast impressions. The things he had derived
from the cylinders and the things he had seen, conflicted, confused him.
It seemed to him the most amazing thing of all that in his thirty years
of life he had never tried to shape a picture of these coming times.
"We were making the future," he said, "and hardly any of us troubled to
think what future we were making. And here it is!"

"What have they got to, what has been done? How do I come into the midst
of it all?" The vastness of street and house he was prepared for,
the multitudes of people. But conflicts in the city ways! And the
systematised sensuality of a class of rich men!

He thought of Bellamy, the hero of whose Socialistic Utopia had so
oddly anticipated this actual experience. But here was no Utopia,
no Socialistic state. He had already seen enough to realise that the
ancient antithesis of luxury, waste and sensuality on the one hand and
abject poverty on the other, still prevailed. He knew enough of the
essential factors of life to understand that correlation. And not only
were the buildings of the city gigantic and the crowds in the street
gigantic, but the voices he had heard in the ways, the uneasiness of
Howard, the very atmosphere spoke of gigantic discontent. What country
was he in? Still England it seemed, and yet strangely "un-English." His
mind glanced at the rest of the world, and saw only an enigmatical veil.

He prowled about his apartment, examining everything as a caged animal
might do. He felt very tired, felt that feverish exhaustion that does
not admit of rest. He listened for long spaces under the ventilator to
catch some distant echo of the tumults he felt must be proceeding in the
city.

He began to talk to himself. "Two hundred and three years!" he said to
himself over and over again, laughing stupidly. "Then I am two hundred
and thirty-three years old! The oldest inhabitant. Surely they haven't
reversed the tendency of our time and gone back to the rule of the
oldest. My claims are indisputable. Mumble, mumble. I remember the
Bulgarian atrocities as though it was yesterday. 'Tis a great age!
Ha ha!" He was surprised at first to hear himself laughing, and then
laughed again deliberately and louder. Then he realised that he was
behaving foolishly. "Steady," he said. "Steady!"

His pacing became more regular. "This new