The Hall of the Atlas

Five minutes ago Graham was an unknown patient searching for the date. Now a city is shouting his name, and the men around him are treating his existence like a political emergency.

Howard forces Graham into a lift and sends it racing upward. Graham is still too weak to resist effectively, but the feeling of compulsion is unmistakable. The people below wanted to see him. Howard wants him hidden.

Graham asks what the shouting meant and why the crowd was fighting around the stairway. Howard admits only that the city is passing through a period of unrest and that Graham's awakening is somehow connected to it.

The answer explains almost nothing. Howard promises that matters will become clearer later, then watches the lift with the impatience of a man who fears being overtaken.

For Graham, every detail competes with the questions. He has been conscious for only a few hours. The future still has the unreality of an exceptionally vivid dream, and even danger can momentarily become spectacle.

The lift opens onto a narrow service corridor crowded with tubes, cables and conduits. Howard calls it one of the city's public-service Ways: the hidden channels through which light, communication and other necessities move.

When Graham asks whether London still has police, Howard gives an answer that captures the complexity of the age: it has about fourteen different police forces.

Howard then admits that almost nobody fully understands the social order—not even the officials who operate it. The city has grown into a web of specialised institutions, each with its own authority.

Men in red uniforms fill the passages. They salute Howard as he passes. The pale-blue clothing Graham saw among ordinary citizens on the Moving Ways is almost entirely absent here.

That contrast begins to teach him something. Red belongs to organised authority. Blue belongs to the population outside it.

They pass a classroom in which girls sit before a machine that appears to teach without a human instructor. Graham tries to look more closely, but Howard hurries him on.

Next comes a glass-walled lift and then a bridge suspended high above the avenue. Its floor is transparent.

Graham looks down between his feet and sees the crowd reduced to a swarming pattern of red and blue hundreds of feet below. The balcony where he stood moments earlier looks like a toy shelf attached to a cliff.

A man drops past in an open cradle sliding along a cable, almost as though falling through the building. Graham stops involuntarily to watch.

The future refuses to arrive in a single revelation. It keeps interrupting fear with wonder.

The route ends at an enormous chamber. At its far end rises a white figure of Atlas, bent beneath the globe. The sculpture is so large that the human beings gathered below it appear deliberately insignificant.

Seven or eight men in white robes stand around a table on a raised dais. These are the Council: the governing trustees whose authority shaped the world during Graham's sleep.

Howard leaves Graham on a distant gallery under red-uniformed guard and crosses the empty floor alone. Graham can see the Councillors arguing, pointing and striking the table, but he cannot hear a word.

Nobody invites him into the discussion, even though he is plainly its subject.

The arrangement tells him more than any speech could. The Council does not yet regard the awakened Sleeper as a ruler. It regards him as a problem to be managed.

When Howard returns, Graham refuses another vague reassurance. He asks directly about his property.

The estate he remembers was respectable but hardly world-changing. It was administered by his cousin Warming while Graham remained unconscious.

Howard begins with familiar names. Warming's own wealth eventually joined Graham's. Other holdings entered the same structure. Investments grew, companies merged, land and debt accumulated, and every generation of trustees reinvested what the Sleeper could not spend.

Two centuries of compounding transformed a private estate into something without precedent.

Howard still avoids giving Graham the full scale, but he admits that the Sleeper has become a person of immense significance. His property reaches into the government, industries and everyday life of the future.

Graham finally sees why his awakening has created panic. The Council's power rests on assets legally held in his name. They have ruled as trustees for a man everyone assumed would never speak.

Now the owner has returned.

Howard says the city is too unstable for Graham to appear publicly. He must be kept secluded until the danger passes.

To Graham, the logic is beginning to reverse. The men who claim to protect him also have the strongest reason to prevent him from understanding what he owns.

He is escorted away from the Hall of Atlas and placed in private rooms.

The door closes without a sound.

When Graham tries it, it does not open.