She couldn't sit now. She raised her massive hips off the straight chair and began pacing up and down the room, her face like an ancient television screen. And the children's eyes followed her like hungry puppies after a mama dog.
"It was the final splurge, children, of the individual man," she said. "Nowadays we have a world of people, all the same, all dull, all safe and healthy and secure. Then it was a world of persons. And in between every bit of violence there was a cozy bit of restful safety. In between every bit of anger there was a silent bit of cozy peace. For every tragic moment there was a moment of sunny happiness."
"And were people really, really allowed to die by themselves?" asked Charley Tencharles.
She stopped and bent a loving glance on him. In the 20th Century he would have been called Teacher's Pet. He was a dear and a doll and an angel.
"Oh, many, many good people," she said, a catch in her voice, "died by themselves. Imagine, some were taken by old age! And, as we said last week, there were those wonderful sicknesses. A person could die of one of those. Nobody in the whole 20th Century had a card in the central bureau which had on it the date of their death. Think of it, children."
She was wound up now, coming to the new part she had to tell them. The part about electronics, which had been an infant science at the start of the 20th Century. Matter transmitters were not known, nor disintegrators. Robots were just on the horizon. Radio and television came to flower. Man was just beginning to step off the face of the world into deep space. And there were so few people on earth that there were open fields all over every continent. Fine blowing trees everywhere, and real, live wild flowers.
"Man started the 20th Century in complete privacy," she said, her vast hips quivering as she paced. "Then came the time—this was during the years of the gangsters—when electronics helped man put tiny ears in rooms, behind pictures on the walls, so private speech could be recorded. And telephones—did I tell you what telephones were?—could be tapped, as they called it, so other people could listen in when you had secrets to tell a friend."
And then, she told them, late in the 20th Century came the best part of the story—the discovery that man could "wiretap" other men so secretly that nobody knew.