The Dancer in the Crystal
by Francis Flagg
It is bad enough to have a fuse in one's home blow out and to stumble about in unfamiliar darkness trying to replace it. The feeling of helplessness that strikes when one tries to switch on electric lights and equipment and obtains no response is one that must have been shared at one time or another by everyone. Now suppose the entire world was short-circuited—every electric channel and source diverted to some unknown wastage; a blown-out fuse in every home, town, industry, railroad, and continent! Such is the stage setting for the opening scene in Francis Flagg's unusual and colorful tale.
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THEY WHO LIVED during that terrible time will never forget it—twenty-five years ago, when the lights went out.
It was in 1956.
All over the world, in the same hour, and practically at the same minute, electrical machinery ceased to function.
The youth of today can hardly realize what a terrible disaster that was for the people of the middle Twentieth Century. England and America, as well as the major nations of Europe, had just finished electrifying their railroads and scrapping the ponderous steam engines which did duty on some lines up until as late as the summer of 1954. A practical method of harnessing the tides and using their energy to develop electricity, coupled with the building of dams and the generating of cheap power through the labor of rushing rivers and giant waterfalls, and the invention of a device for broadcasting it by wireless as cheaply as it was generated, had hastened this electrification. The perfection of a new vacuum tube by the General Electric Company at Schenectady, in the United States, had made gas economically undesirable. The new method, by which it was possible to relay heat for all purposes at one-third the cost of illuminating gas, swept the various gas companies into oblivion. Even the steamers which plied the seven seas, and the giant planes that soared the air, received the power that turned their propellers, warmed their cabins and cooked their foods, in much the same fashion as did the factories, the railroads, and the private homes and the hotels ashore. Therefore when electricity ceased to
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