But it was not part of the matrix which had produced him. The Church of the Second Coming, the Asiatic invasion of America, the mechaniolatry of the Australian Reformers, the invasion of Luna by the weirdly changed descendants of Earth’s old Martian colonists, the Scientific State, the Overthrow, the retirement of the Dissenters, the evolution of the family groups…Well, what was it? A story, a dream which had passed by while he slept, the thoughts and deeds and struggles of men unthought of in his own age.

Napoleon had been an almost living reality to Hart. He had read Emil Ludwig, he had listened to Die Beiden Grenadiere, he had heard all the tired old jokes about crazy men with hands in their coats, he had been subjected to the wistful reminiscences of old men who had grown up in that forever lost world which came between the Congress of Vienna and the murder at Sarajevo—he had, without being unusually interested in the Corsican, lived in a world where the little man had been a dominating influence even a century after his death. Napoleon was as much a part of his background, part of the complex of events which had, inter alia, produced Philip Hart, as the sun or the moon or the banging canyons of New York.

But could an imperial Roman transported to the twentieth century feel that a defeated dictator of a hundred years ago had existed? Would Napoleon be more than a dusty fiction? Would the Roman consider it logical that Frenchmen should be below the average European height, that the French law should be completely revised, that the Louisiana Territory should be American and Haiti independent, that the Nelson column should rise in London, that the whole existing world should be, all because of one little condottiere? The Roman might realize the fact, with the top of his mind, but it would not look reasonable to him. Because he would not be one of those inevitable results.

Hart gave up trying to make more than superficial sense out of all that had happened since the twentieth century, and simply learned the salient facts. He got a rough outline of the present political and economic status of man.

Earth—and the Lunar cave-cities—were under one rule. The colonists on Venus, Mars, and the outer planet satellites had evolved their own societies, often radically different from that of the mother world; man himself had had to become modified before he could settle the reaches of space, an evolution which had been carried out by the eugenics of the Scientific State with ruthless completeness. There was still regular interplanetary contact, but it was infrequent. The different branches of man had too little in common by now. Once in a great while there would be a ship from one of the colonies on the nearer stars, but distances were too great; even Alpha Centauri was fifty years away, and social evolution was diverging out there.

But could it be said that Earth was—ruled? Not in any traditional sense. The social organization was uniform, and a single council did what little administrative work the planet required. But there was nothing like a real government. History—wars, social changes, migrations, important new discoveries and concepts, events of any great significance—had been slowing for the last three centuries, ever since the family-group society had gained the ascendancy. For the last hundred years or so, nothing had really happened to mankind as a whole. Nothing!