nery; people living in a world
of beauty who never had seen it; who knew of nothing but the city
arcades where the sun never shone and where amusements were as
artificial as the light and air.

Then man awakened to his folly. Disease broke out in New York City in
2551, and in a month swept eight million people into death. The cities
were proclaimed impractical, unsafe. And suddenly the people realized
how greatly they hated the city; how strangely beautiful the world
could be in the fashion God created it....

There was, over the next fifty years, an exodus to the rural sections.
Food was produced more cheaply, largely because it was produced more
abundantly. Man found his wants suddenly simplified.

And business found that concentration was unnecessary. The telephone
and television made personal contacts not needed. The aircraft, the
high-speed auto-trucks over modern speedways, the aeroplane-motored
monorails, the rocket-trains--all these shortened distance. And, most
important of all, the transportation of electrical energy from great
central power companies made small industrial units practical even
upon remote farms. The age of electricity came into its own. The
cities were doomed....

* * * * *

Larry saw, through 2600 and 2700 A.D., a new form of civilization
rising around him. At first it seemed a queer combination of the old
fashioned village and a strange modernism. There were, here upon
Manhattan Island, metal houses, widely spaced in gardens, and
electrically powered factories of unfamiliar aspect. Overhead were
skeleton structures, like landing stages; and across the further
distance was the fleeting, transitory wraith of a monorail air-road.
Along the river banks were giant docks for surface vessels and sub-sea
freighters. There was a little concentration here, but not much. Man
had learned his lesson.

This was a new era. Man was striving really to play, as well as work.
But the work had to be done. With the constant development of
mechanical devices, there was always a new machine devised to help the
operation of its fellow. And over it all was the hand of the human,
until suddenly the worker found that he was no more than an attendant
upon an inanimate thing which did everything more skilfully than he
could do it. Thus came the idea of the Robot--something to attend, to
oversee, to operate machines. In Larry's time it had already begun
with a myriad devices of "aut