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CHAPTER I
INSOMNIA
"Had advice?"
"Yes."
"Yes?"
"But a suicide over that cliff (or any cliff for the matter
of that), really, as an artist --" He laughed.
"It's so damned amateurish."
"Yes."
"It's all right, old chap," said Isbister with the air
of an old friend. "Don't worry yourself. Trust to
me."
He stopped feebly.
CHAPTER II
THE TRANCE
"Smithers?"
"Induction coils."
Pause.
"Yes?"
"Partly."
"If he wakes."
CHAPTER III
THE AWAKENING
CHAPTER IV
"How long?"
"Morel"
"More."
"Well?"
"Very."
"I can't come," said the thickset man; "I have _him_
to see to. But shout from the balcony."
"Mesmerist! He is a capillotomist."
"Capillotomist!"
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
"Several?"
"About fourteen."
_"Why?"_
"Orders, Sire."
"Whose orders?"
"What Council?"
"_The_ Council."
He stopped.
"Yes?"
"No harm!"
"Precisely."
"Not now."
"Why not?"
"What council?"
CHAPTER VII
"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!
"Am I a fool?"
"Certainly not."
He paused meaningly.
CHAPTER VIII
"Ostrog?"
"Yes, Sire."
"I did not see you, Sire," panted the man. He rose
and assisted Graham to arise. "Are you hurt, Sire?"
he panted. A succession of heavy blows on the ventilator
began, something fell close to Graham's face,
and a shivering edge of white metal danced, fell over,
and lay flat upon the floor.
"What is this?" cried Graham, confused and looking
at the ventilator. "Who are you? What are you
going to do? Remember, I understand nothing."
For the most part the glass was bedewed, and Graham
saw only hazy suggestions of the forms below,
but near the pitch of the transparent roof the glass was
clear, and he found himself looking sheerly down upon
it all. For awhile, in spite of the urgency of his
guide, he gave way to vertigo and lay spread-eagled
on the glass, sick and paralysed. Far below, mere
stirring specks and dots, went the people of the unsleeping
city in their perpetual daylight, and the moving
platforms ran on their incessant journey. Messengers
and men on unknown businesses shot along
the drooping cables and the frail bridges were crowded
with men. It was like peering into a gigantic glass
hive, and it lay vertically below him with only a tough
glass of unknown thickness to save him from a fall.
The street showed warm and lit, and Graham was wet
now to the skin with thawing snow, and his feet were
numbed with cold. For a space he could not move.
CHAPTER IX
"But _why?_"
CHAPTER X
Lucky it was for him that these shots were the first
fired in anger for a hundred and fifty years. He heard
bullets whacking over his head, felt a splash of molten
metal sting his ear, and perceived without looking that
the whole opposite facade, an unmasked ambuscade of
red police, was crowded and bawling and firing at him.
There were moments when his feet did not touch the
ground. Then he was staggering and shoving. He
heard shouts of "They are coming!" and a muffled
cry close to him. His foot blundered against
something soft, he heard a hoarse scream under foot. He
heard shouts of "The Sleeper!" but he was too
confused to speak. He heard the green weapons
crackling. For a space he lost his individual will,
became an atom in a panic, blind, unthinking, mechanical.
He thrust and pressed back and writhed in the
pressure, kicked presently against a step, and found
himself ascending a slope. And abruptly the faces all
about him leapt out of the black, visible, ghastly-white
and astonished, terrified, perspiring, in a livid glare.
One face, a young man's, was very near to him, not
twenty inches away. At the time it was but a passing
incident of no emotional value, but afterwards it came
back to him in his dreams. For this young man,
wedged upright in the crowd for a time, had been shot
and was already dead.
CHAPTER XI
THE OLD MAN WHO KNEW EVERYTHING
"I stay here till the lights come again," said the old
man." These blue scoundrels are everywhere --
everywhere."
"I know a few things," said the old man. "I know
a thing or two. But -- . Hark!"
"Graham."
"No, I mean -- that American's."
"Isbister."
"Of course not," said the old man. "Of course not.
People don't learn much in the schools nowadays.
But I know all about him. He was a rich American
who went from England, and he left the Sleeper even
more than Warming. How he made it? That I don't
know. Something about pictures by machinery. But
he made it and left it, and so the Council had its start.
It was just a council of trustees at first."
"Where is he?"
"Well?"
"Eh?"
Graham paused.
CHAPTER XII
OSTROG
"I am Ostrog."
"The Boss?"
"So I am called."
"My double?"
"I wondered."
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
PROMINENT PEOPLE
"Poet Laureate."
"You still?"
"Too much?"
CHAPTER XVI
THE AEROPHILE
"What is it?"
CHAPTER XVII
THREE DAYS
The next day, and another day, and yet another day
passed in such interests as these. Each day Graham
spent many hours in the glorious entertainment of
flying. On the third day he soared across middle
France, and within sight of the snow-clad Alps. These
vigorous exercises gave him restful sleep, and each day
saw a great stride in his health from the spiritless
anaemia of his first awakening. And whenever he was
not in the air, and awake, Lincoln was assiduous in the
cause of his amusement; all that was novel and curious
in contemporary invention was brought to him, until
at last his appetite for novelty was well-nigh glutted.
One might fill a dozen inconsecutive volumes with the
strange things they exhibited. Each afternoon he held
his court for an hour or so. He speedily found his
interest in his contemporaries becoming personal and
intimate. At first he had been alert chiefly for
unfamiliarity and peculiarity; any foppishness in their
dress, any discordance with his preconceptions of
nobility in their status and manners had jarred upon
him, and it was remarkable to him how soon that
strangeness and the faint hostility that arose from it,
disappeared; how soon he came to appreciate the true
perspective of his position, and see the old Victorian
days remote and quaint. He found himself particularly
amused by the red-haired daughter of the Manager
of the European Piggeries. On the second day
after dinner he made the acquaintance of a latter-day
dancing girl, and found her an astonishing artist. And
after that, more hypnotic wonders. On the third day
Lincoln was moved to suggest that the Master should
repair to a Pleasure City, but this Graham declined,
nor would he accept the services of the hypnotists in
his aeronautical experiments. The link of locality held
him to London; he found a perpetual wonder in
topographical identifications that he would have missed
abroad. "Here -- or a hundred feet below here," he
could say, "I used to eat my midday cutlets during
my London University days. Underneath here was
Waterloo and the perpetual hunt for confusing trains.
Often have I stood waiting down there, bag in hand,
and stared up into the sky above the forest of signals,
little thinking I should walk some day a hundred yards
in the air. And now in that very sky that was once a
grey smoke canopy, I circle in an aeropile."
CHAPTER XVIII
GRAHAM REMEMBERS
"Well?"
"That is all."
"What?"
He looked interrogative.
"Well?"
"Yes?"
"But --"
He stopped blankly.
"Slavery!" he said.
"Slavery."
"Everywhere."
"In the old times, how did you manage with starving
people?"
"Yes."
"Yes?"
to weigh considerations.
"And then?"
"Yes?"
"That you will help me."
"I! -- a girl!"
CHAPTER XIX
"Yes?"
"Well?"
"And here?"
Ostrog stared.
"Certainly not."
CHAPTER XX
Froebel.
There were nurses here, but much was
done by machines that sang and danced and dandled.
"Most of them."
"How is that?"
"You."
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
"By twilight."
"Ready!"
"Nothing."
She put her hand to her throat, and her lips were .
white. She stared before her as if she saw some
horrible possibility. Suddenly her features changed.
"Oh, but I have been honest!" she cried, and then,
"Have I been honest? I loved the world and freedom,
I hated cruelty and oppression. Surely it was
that."
"Smashed?"
"None."
"Do what?"
CHAPTER XXIV
"I can't see him now," said the second man in a ton
of provocation.
THE END
End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of When the Sleeper Wakes, by Wells