cultivator being played
across the fields, but Northern Illinois as a whole was one inky,
apparently uninhabited, waste of high, forced woods. Only our
illuminated map, with its little pointer switching from county to county
as we wheeled and twisted, gave us any idea of our position. Our calls,
urgent, pleading, coaxing or commanding, through the General
Communicator brought no answer.' Illinois strictly maintained her own
privacy in the timber which she grew for that purpose.

'Oh, this is absurd!' said De Forest. 'We're like an owl trying to work
a wheat-field. Is this Bureau Creek? Let's land, Arnott, and get hold of
some one.'

We brushed over a belt of forced woodland--fifteen-year-old maple sixty
feet high--grounded on a private meadow-dock, none too big, where we
moored to our own grapnels, and hurried out through the warm dark night
towards a light in a verandah. As we neared the garden gate I could have
sworn we had stepped knee-deep in quicksand, for we could scarcely drag
our feet against the prickling currents that clogged them. After five
paces we stopped, wiping our foreheads, as hopelessly stuck on dry
smooth turf as so many cows in a bog.

'Pest!' cried Pirolo angrily. 'We are ground-circuited. And it is my own
system of ground-circuits too! I know the pull.'

'Good evening,' said a girl's voice from the verandah. 'Oh, I'm sorry!
We've locked up. Wait a minute.'

We heard the click of a switch, and almost fell forward as the currents
round our knees were withdrawn.

The girl laughed, and laid aside her knitting. An old-fashioned
Controller stood at her elbow, which she reversed from time to time, and
we could hear the snort and clank of the obedient cultivator half a mile
away, behind the guardian woods.

'Come in and sit down,' she said. 'I'm only playing a plough. Dad's
gone to Chicago to--Ah! Then it was _your_ call I heard just now!'

She had caught sight of Arnott's Board uniform, leaped to the switch,
and turned it full on.

We were checked, gasping, waist-deep in current this time, three yards
from the verandah.

'We only want to know what's the matter with Illinois,' said De Forest
placidly.

'Then hadn't you better go to Chicago and find out?' she answered.
'There's nothing wrong here. We own ourselves.'

'How can we go anywhere if you won't loose us?' De Forest went on, while
Arnott scowled. Admirals of Fleets are still quite human when their
dignity is touched.

'Stop a min