Page:Karel Čapek - The Absolute at Large (1927).djvu/116

 Industrial Bank, in the textile works at Upice, aboard Kuzenda's dredge, and on Binder's merry-go-round. He has described the tragic experience of Blahous, the result of long-range infection, induced by the free and mobile Absolute, which had evidently begun to spread in a serious fashion, although after no definite plan.

But now you must remember that since the beginning of the whole affair countless thousands of Karburators of the most diverse types had been manufactured. Trains, flying-machines, automobiles, and ships driven by this most economical of all motors discharged along their routes whole clouds of the Absolute, just as in other days they used to leave a trail of dust, smoke, and smells. You must remember that thousands of factories all over the world had already scrapped their old boilers and equipped themselves with Karburators; that hundreds of Government departments and offices, hundreds of banks, exchanges, wholesale and export firms, as well as huge restaurants, hotels, military barracks, schools, theatres, tenements, thousands of newspaper offices and clubs, cabarets, and households were being heated by the latest M.E.C. Central-Heating Karburator. You must remember that the Stinnes interests with all their ramifications had amalgamated with the M.E.C., and that the American Ford works had flung themselves into mass-production