"How can we stop them? We cannot, without war."
My mind clung to Nanette. Cut off from us. No chance to get to her—it would start the warfare, which of everything else I understood at once was what this Council feared. There were mirrors here—and hundreds more in the adjoining room—picturing present scenes all over the city, and over the world. But none from the Turber area—that was insulated against them.
How changed was this world from ours of 1945! Changed in every smallest detail. Our familiar nations were gone. White, Yellow and Black nations now, in a trinity of alliance. The White Nation was headed by Anglo-Saxonia.
It was a vast world of business unified by transportation. There were no ships, it seemed, on the seas, save perhaps locally in very small areas. No great railroads. The age of the air.
Power was universally distributed by aerial vibrations. It was broadcast by a central plant in Scotland. Transformers were at Niagara, the Iguazu in South America, and Victoria Falls in Africa. The power was tapped by air-liners; by the city trains; by the factories which now were spread over every rural district; it operated all lights—all motors down to the smallest.
There was now spread before us, in terms of this super-modern world, the culmination of Turber's plans. There was a Turber Empire here now.
He had brought, with many trips of his aero, a constant stream of villains gathered from the Past. How many thousands of them, we never knew. And brought his treasure.
The city here knew him first as a wealthy man with a business organization, buying up small sections of the city. His wealth and his power grew, until now, ten years after his appearance in this Time-world, he was a figure gigantic. He and his followers—his organization—owned now all the southern area of the city. In ancient terms: Staten Island—New York Harbor—a portion of Brooklyn—and adjacent New Jersey.
Outside the city the Turberites owned and had colonized a strip of land some twenty miles wide by six hundred miles long. Bought with gold—like a gigantic railroad right-of-way. The strip ran from the New Jersey edge of the city southward through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and into the Carolina Mountains. All ancient terms, these, of course.