Presently my eyes looked upward: dangling at the top of a moss-grown
building I saw what seemed to be the remains of telephone wires.

"What became of all that," I said, "the telegraph and the telephone
and all the system of communication?"

"Ah," said the Man in Asbestos, "that was what a telephone meant,
was it? I knew that it had been suppressed centuries ago. Just what
was it for?"

"Why," I said with enthusiasm, "by means of the telephone we could
talk to anybody, call up anybody, and talk at any distance."

"And anybody could call you up at any time and talk?" said the Man in
Asbestos, with something like horror. "How awful! What a dreadful
age yours was, to be sure. No, the telephone and all the rest of it,
all the transportation and intercommunication was cut out and
forbidden. There was no sense in it. You see," he added, "what you
don't realise is that people after your day became gradually more and
more reasonable. Take the railroad, what good was that? It brought
into every town a lot of people from every other town. Who wanted
them? Nobody. When work stopped and commerce ended, and food was
needless, and the weather killed, it was foolish to move about. So
it was all terminated. Anyway," he said, with a quick look of
apprehension and a change in his voice, "it was dangerous!"

"So!" I said. "Dangerous! You still have danger?"

"Why, yes," he said, "there's always the danger of getting broken."