Firstborn(Time Odyssey 3) - By Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,91

much time.

They hurried from the room, Alexei muttering instructions to the Maxwell.
PART 3 REUNIONS 45: MAYOR
Shopping in Chicago turned out to be just that. Remarkably, you could stroll along Michigan Avenue and other thoroughfares, and inspect the windows of stores like Marshall Fields where goods were piled up on display and mannequins modeled suits and dresses and coats. You could buy fur coats and boots and other cold-weather essentials, but Emeline would only look at the fashion, as she called them, which turned out to be relics of the stores 1890s stock, once imported from a vanished New York or Boston, lovingly preserved and much patched and repaired since. Bisesa thought Emeline would have been bewildered to be faced with the modernity of thirty-two years later on Earth, the fashions of 1926.

So they shopped. But the street outside Marshall Fields was half-blocked by the carcass of a horse, desiccated, frozen in place where it had fallen. The lights in the window were smoky candles of seal blubber and horse fat. And though there were some young people around, they were mostly working in the stores. All the shoppers, as far as Bisesa could see, were old, Emelines age or older, survivors of the Discontinuity picking through these shabby, worn-out relics of a lost past.

Mayor Rices office was deep in the guts of City Hall.

Hard-backed chairs had been drawn up before a desk. Bisesa, Emeline, and Abdi sat in a row, and were kept waiting.

This room wasnt swathed with insulation like Emelines apartment. Its walls were adorned with flock wallpaper and portraits of past dignitaries. A fire burned hugely in a hearth, and there was central heating too, a dry warmth supplied by heavy iron radiators, no doubt fed by some wood-burning monster of a furnace in the basement. A telephone was fixed to the wall, a very primitive sort, just a box with a speaking tube, and an ear trumpet you held to your head. On the mantelpiece a clock ticked, defiantly set to Chicago standard railway time, four P.M., just as it had been for thirty-two years, despite the difference of opinion expressed by the world outside.

Bisesa felt oddly glad she had opted to wear her purple Babylonian clothes, as had Abdi, despite the offer of a more formal suit by Emeline. She felt she wanted to keep her own identity here.

She whispered to the others, So this is 1920s Chicago. I think I'm expecting Al Capone. Her phone murmured, In 1894 Capone was in New York. He couldnt be here now Oh, shut up. She said to Emeline, Tell me about Mayor Jacob Rice. Hes only about thirtyborn after the Freeze.

And the son of a mayor?

Emeline shook her head. Not exactly...

The hour of the Discontinuity had been shocking for Chicagoans. After all it had started snowing, in July. Excited stevedores reported icebergs on Lake Michigan. And from their offices in the upper floors of the Rookery and the Montauk, businessmen looked north to see a line of bone white on the horizon. The mayor had been out of town. His deputy desperately tried to make long-distance phone calls to New York and Washington, but to no avail; if President Cleveland still lived, out there beyond the ice, he could offer no help or guidance to Chicago.

Things deteriorated quickly in those first days. As the food riots worsened, as old folks began to freeze, as the suburbs began to burn, the deputy mayor made his best decision. Recognizing the limits of his own capacity, he formulated an Emergency Committee, a representative sample of the citys leading citizens. Here were the chief of police and commanders of the National Guard, and top businessmen and landowners, and the leaders of all of Chicagos powerful unions. Here too was Jane Addams, Saint Jane, a noted social reformer who ran a womens refuge called Hull House, and Thomas Alva Edison, the great inventor, forty-seven years old, caught by chance by the Freeze and pining for his lost laboratories in New Jersey.

And here was Colonel Edmund Rice, a veteran of Gettysburg who had run the Columbian Guard, a dedicated police force for the worlds fair, only a year before. The deputy mayor gladly gave up his seat as chair of the Committee to Rice.

Under martial law, the Committee clamped down on the gathering crime wave, and tidied up the deputy mayors hasty rationing and curfew proclamations. Rice established new medical centers, where a brisk triage system was put in place, and emergency cemeteries were