We had passed numbers of subway entrances, with gentle ramps descending into clean, white-walled passages, along which I had seen an endless series of trucks proceeding on single rails. Beneath the Strangers’ House I saw the termination of a branch line; and, as we stood watching, a porter in blue seized a small truck which had detached itself from the rail, and, with a slight push, sent it spinning into a goods elevator.
“Gyroscopic action,” explained David. “Above this is the House kitchen, connecting with the district sub-kitchen by means of a two-foot tube.”
And every now and then he would stop in the midst of his explanations and cast that searching look at me, as if to inquire whether I could be ignorant of all this.
We stepped into an elevator, David pressed a button, and the cage shot up to the top story. Opposite us was a door with a bell at the side, as in the old-fashioned apartment. David rang, and the door opened, revealing a girl about eighteen years of age, who looked at me with parted lips and an expression that was unmistakably fear.
“Arnold, this is my daughter Elizabeth,” said David, kissing her. “Arnold is under our special care,” he continued. “He comes from a very distant city outside the Federation, and is waiting to be ascribed. He knows no more about civilization than if he had just awakened after a sleep of a century.”
The girl shot a quick, dubious, searching glance at me. I met it steadily, and she turned her eyes away. Again she looked at me, and my gaze apparently reassured her, for she gave me her hand in a very unaffected manner, and we went through a living-room into a simply furnished dining-room. It much resembled one of my own century, except that the furniture was in good taste; the curves and spirals and volutes of our machine-carved chairs and tables were gone; the wall was of a plain gray, without paper or pictures; the carpet was plain, and the absence of curls and twists even on the handles of the cutlery was extraordinarily restful. Between the two rooms was a small enclosed space containing a telephone funnel with knobs and levers disposed about it, and a dumb-waiter. The table linen was of a peculiar lusterless black. Looking out of the window, I saw that the uppermost street ran past it, and occasionally the hatless head of a pedestrian appeared.
“Anything new to you, Arnold?” inquired my host, as we took our places at the table.
“Principally the color of the table linen,” I answered. “Black seems strange to me.”
“Black! Do you call that black?” asked David in surprise. “Why, that is mull, and not at all like black to me. For my part I prefer the old-fashioned white, but two years ago, when the plans to dress us in mull instead of blue were rescinded, the Wool and Linen bosses had accumulated a large quantity of mull goods in the warehouses on speculation, the loss of which would have hurt them badly—so we were asked to use mull-colored table linen.”
“Do you like chicken?” inquired Elizabeth. “It is of last year’s freezing, and I got it as a special favor, for the supply for 34–5 is not yet exhausted, and they are supposed not to draw on the new cellars. If father had told me that he was going to bring home a guest—”