The Time Ships (20 page)

M
y latest trip through time was bumpy and even more disorienting than usual, I judged because of the uneven distribution of those scraps of Plattnerite about the ’Naut. But the journey was brief, and at length the sense of plummeting faded.

Filby had been sitting there with arms folded and jowls tucked against his chest, the perfect picture of misery. Now he glanced up at what I had taken to be a clock on the wall, and he slapped his hand against his bony knee. ‘Ha! – here we are; once more, it is the Sixteenth of June, A.D. 1938.’ He began to unravel his constraints.

I got out of my chair and took a closer look at that ‘clock’. I found that – although the hands made up a conventional clock face – the device also featured several little chronometric dials. I snorted and tapped the glass face of the thing with my finger. I said to Moses, ‘Look at this! It is a chronometric clock, but it shows
years and months
– over-engineering, Moses; a characteristic of Government projects. I’m surprised it doesn’t feature little dolls with rain-coats and sun-hats, to show the passing of the seasons!’

After a few minutes we were joined by Captain Hilary Bond, and the young trooper who had collected us from Richmond Hill (whose name, Bond told us, was Harry Oldfield). The little cabin became rather crowded. Captain Bond said, ‘I’ve received
instructions about you. My mission is to escort you to Imperial College, where research into Chronic Displacement Warfare is being conducted.’

I had not heard of this college, but I did not inquire further.

Oldfield was carrying a box of gas-masks and metallic epaulettes. ‘Here,’ he said to us, ‘you’d better put these on.’

Moses held up a gas-mask with distaste. ‘You cannot expect me to insert my head into such a contraption.’

‘Oh, you must,’ Filby said anxiously, and I saw he was already buttoning his own mask about his jowly face. ‘We’ve a little way to go in the open out there, you know. And it’s not safe. Not safe!’

‘Come on,’ I said to Moses, as I grimly took a set of mask and epaulettes for myself. ‘We’re not at home any more, I’m afraid, old man.’

The epaulettes were heavy, but clipped easily to my jacket; but the mask Oldfield gave me, though roomy and well-fitting, was most uncomfortable. I found the twin eye-goggles fogging up almost immediately, the rubber and leather ridges of its construction soon pooling with sweat. ‘I shall never get used to this.’

‘I hope we’re not here long enough to have to,’ Moses hissed with feeling, his voice muffled by his own mask.

I turned to Nebogipfel. The poor Morlock – already trussed up in his schoolboy’s uniform – was now topped by a ridiculous mask several sizes too big for him: when he moved his head, the insectile filter on the front of the thing actually wobbled.

I patted his head. ‘At least you’ll blend with the crowds now, Nebogipfel!’

He forbore to reply.

We emerged from the metallic womb of the
Raglan
into a bright summer’s day. It was around two in the afternoon, and the sunlight splashed from the drab colours of the ’Naut. My mask immediately filled with perspiration and fog, and I longed to take the heavy, tight thing off my head.

The sky overhead was immense, a deep blue and free of cloud – although here and there I could see thin white lines and swirls, tracings of vapour or ice crystals etched across the sky. I saw a glint at one end of such a trail – perhaps it was sunlight shimmering from some metal Flying Machine.

The Juggernaut was perched on a version of the Petersham Road which was much changed from 1873, or even 1891. I recognised most of the houses from my day: even my own still stood behind an area-rail that was corroded and covered in verdigris. But the gardens and verges seemed uniformly to have been dug over, and given up to a crop of a vegetable I did not know. And I saw that many of the houses had suffered great damage. Some had been reduced to little more than facia, with their roofs and interior partitioning blasted in: here and there, buildings had been blackened and hollowed out by fire; and others were reduced quite to rubble. Even my own house was broken up, and the laboratory was quite demolished. And the damage was not recent: resurgent life, green and vital, had reclaimed the interior of many of the houses; moss and young plants carpeted the remnants of living-rooms and hall-ways, and ivy hung like bizarre curtains over the gaping windows.

I was able to see that the trees still fell away down the same sylvan slope to the Thames, but even the trees showed signs of damage: I saw the stumps of snapped-off branches, scorched boles, and the like. It was as if a great wind, or fire, had passed by here. The Pier was undamaged, but of Richmond Bridge only the haunches remained now, blackened and trun
cated, with the span quite demolished. Much of the river-side meadows towards Petersham had been given over to the same peculiar crop which had inhabited the gardens, I saw, and there was a brown scum floating down the river itself.

There was nobody about. No traffic moved; the weeds pushed through the broken-up road surfaces. I heard no people – no laughing or shouting, no children playing – no animals, no horses, no birds singing.

Of the gaiety which had once characterized a June afternoon from this prospect – the flashing of oars, the laughter of pleasure-seekers floating up off the river – none of that remained.

All of that was gone now, in this grim Year; and perhaps forever. This was a deserted Richmond, a dead place. I was reminded of the splendid ruins in the garden-like world of A.D. 802,701. I had thought all of that remote from me; I had never imagined to see my own familiar England in such a state!

‘Great God,’ Moses said. ‘What a catastrophe – what destruction! Is England abandoned?’

‘Oh, no,’ Trooper Oldfield put in brightly. ‘But places like this just aren’t safe any more. There’s the gas, and the aerial torpedoes – most people have gone in, to the Domes, do you see?’

‘But it’s all so broken-down, Filby,’ I protested. ‘What’s become of the spirit of our people? Where’s the will to set to and repair all this? It could be done, you know –’

Filby rested a gloved hand on my arm. ‘One day – when this wretched business is done – then we’ll revive it all. Eh? And it shall be just as it was. But for now …’ His voice broke off, and I wished I could see his expression. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’d better get out of the open.’

We left the
Raglan
behind and hurried along the road towards the town centre: Moses, Nebogipfel and I, with Filby and the two soldiers. Our companions from 1938 walked in a kind of crouch, with endless, nervous glances at the sky. I noted again how Bond walked with a pronounced limp favouring her left leg.

I glanced back with longing at the Juggernaut, for within, I knew, was my Time Machine – my only possible way home, out of this unfolding nightmare of Multiple Histories – but I knew there was no prospect of reaching the machine now; all I could do was to wait on events.

We walked along Hill Street, and then turned into George Street. There was none of the bustle and elegance which had characterized this shopping street in my Year. The department stores, like Gosling’s and Wright’s, were boarded up, and even the planks which sealed up their windows had faded with years of sunlight. I saw how one corner of Gosling’s window had been prised open, evidently by looters; the hole that had been made looked as if it had been gnawed by a rat the size of a human. We passed a squat shelter with a beetling cover, and a pillar beside it with chequered markings and a glass face, now cracked. This too looked abandoned, and the bright yellow-and-black paintwork of the pillar was chipped and peeling.

‘It is a shelter against air-raids,’ Filby told me in answer to my query. ‘One of the early designs. Quite inadequate – if ever a direct impact had come … Well! And the pillar marks a first-aid point, equipped with respirators and masks. Hardly used, before the great retreat into the Domes began.’

‘
Air-raids
… This is not a happy world, Filby, to have coined such terms.’

He sighed. ‘They have aerial torpedoes, you see.
The Germans, I mean. Flying machines, which can go to a spot two hundred miles away, drop a Bomb and return! – all mechanical, without the intervention of a man. It’s a world of marvels, for War is a terrific motivation for the inventive mind, you know. You’ll love it here!’

‘The Germans …’ Moses said. ‘We’ve had nothing but trouble with the Germans since the emergence of Bismarck. Is that old scoundrel still alive?’

‘No, but he has able successors,’ Filby said grimly.

I had no comment to make. From my perspective, so detached now from Moses’s, even such a brute as Bismarck scarcely seemed to warrant the loss of a single human life.

Filby was telling me, in breathless fragments, of more of the marvellous War-faring gargantua of this benighted age: of raider submarines, designed to prosecute the gas battles, with practically unlimited cruising range, and containing half a dozen air missiles each, all packed with a formidable supply of gas bombs; of a torrent of ironmongery which I imagined tearing its way across the battered plains of Europe; of more ‘Juggernauts’ which could go underwater, or float, or burrow; and all of it was opposed by an equally formidable array of mines and guns of all sorts.

I avoided Nebogipfel’s eyes; I could not face his judgement! For this was no patch on a Sphere in the sky, populated by ab-human descendants remote from me: this was
my
world,
my
race, gone mad with War! For my part, I retained something of that greater perspective I had acquired in the Interior of that great construct. I could scarcely bear to see my own nation given over to such folly, and it pained me to hear Moses’s contributions, bound up as they were by the petty preconceptions of his day. I could hardly
blame
him!
– but it distressed me to think that my own imagination had ever been so limited, so
malleable
.

W
e reached a crude rail station. But this was not the station I had used in 1891 to ride from Richmond into Waterloo, through Barnes; this new construction was away from the centre of the town, being located just off the Kew Road. And it was an odd sort of station: there was nothing in the way of ticket collection points or destination boards, and the platform was a bare strip of concrete. A new line was crudely laid out. A train waited for us: the locomotive was a drab, dark affair which puffed steam mournfully about its soot-smeared boiler, and there was a single carriage. There were no lights on the locomotive, nor any insignia of the governing Railway Company.

Trooper Oldfield pulled open the carriage door; it was heavy, with a rubber seal around the edge. Oldfield’s eyes, visible behind their goggles, flicked about. Richmond, on a sunny afternoon in 1938, was not a safe place to be!

The carriage was plain: there were rows of hard wooden benches – that was all – nothing in the way of padding, or any decoration. The paint-work was a uniform dull brown, without character. The windows were sealed shut, and there were blinds which could be pulled down over them.

We settled into our places, facing each other
rather stiffly. The heat inside the carriage on that sunny day was stifling.

Once Oldfield had closed the door, the train started into motion immediately, with something of a lurch.

‘Evidently we’re the only passengers,’ Moses murmured.

‘Well, it’s a rum sort of train,’ I said. ‘Rather bare amenities, Filby – eh?’

‘It isn’t much of an age for comforts, old man.’

We passed through some miles of the desolate sort of countryside we had seen around Richmond. The land had been given over almost entirely to agriculture, it seemed to me, and was mostly deserted of people, although here and there I saw a figure or two scraping at some field. It might have been a scene from the fifteenth century, not the twentieth – save for the ruined and bombed-out houses which littered the countryside, with, here and there, the imposing brow of bomb shelters: these were great carapaces of concrete, half-submerged in the ground. Soldiers with guns patrolled the perimeters of these shelters, glaring at the world through their bug-faced gasmasks, as if daring any refugee to approach.

Near Mortlake I saw four men hanging from telegraph poles by a road-side. Their bodies were limp and blackened, and evidently the birds had been at them. I remarked on this horrifying sight to Filby – he and the soldiers had not even noticed the presence of the corpses – and he turned his watery gaze in that direction, and muttered something about how ‘no doubt they were caught stealing swedes, or some such’.

I was given to understand such sights were common, in this England of 1938.

Just then – quite without warning – the train plunged down a slope and into a tunnel. Two weak
electric bulbs set in the ceiling cut into operation, and we sat there in their yellow glow, lowering at each other.

I asked Filby, ‘Is this an Underground train? We are on some extension of the Metropolitan Line, I imagine.’

Filby seemed confused. ‘Oh, I imagine the line has some Number or other …’

Moses began to fumble with his mask. ‘At least we can be shut of these terrible things.’

Bond laid a hand on his arm. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It isn’t safe.’

Filby nodded his agreement. ‘The gas gets everywhere.’ I thought he shuddered, but in that drab, loose outfit of his it was difficult to be sure. ‘Until you’ve been through it –’

Then, in brief, vivid words, he painted a picture of a gas raid he had witnessed in the early stages of the War, in Knightsbridge, when bombs had still been tipped by hand from floating balloons, and the population was not yet accustomed to it all.

And such ghastly scenes had become commonplace, Filby implied, in this world of endless War!

‘It’s a wonder to me that morale hasn’t cracked altogether, Filby.’

‘People aren’t like that, it seems. People endure. Of course there have been low moments,’ he went on. ‘I remember August of 1918, for instance … It was a moment when it seemed the Western Allies might get on top of the damn Germans, after so long, and get the War completed. But then came the Kaiser’s Battle: the
Kaiserschlacht
, Ludendorff’s great victory, in which he smashed his way between the British and French lines … After four years of Trench War, it was a great breakthrough for them. Of course the bombing in Paris, which killed so many of the French general staff, didn’t help us …’

Captain Bond nodded. ‘The rapid victory in the West enabled the Germans to turn their attentions to the Russians in the East. Then, by 1925 –’

‘By 1925,’ said Filby, ‘the blessed Germans had established their dreamed-of
Mitteleuropa
.’

He and Bond sketched the situation for me.
Mitteleuropa
: Axis Europe, a single market stretching from the Atlantic coast to beyond the Urals. By 1925 the Kaiser’s control extended from the Atlantic to the Baltic, through Russian Poland as far as the Crimea. France had become a weakened rump, shorn of much of its resources. Luxembourg was turned, by force, into a German federal state. Belgium and Holland were compelled to put their ports at German disposal. The mines of France, Belgium and Rumania were exploited to fuel further expansion of the Reich, to the East, and the Slavs were pushed back, and millions of non-Russians were ‘freed’ from Moscow’s dominance …

And so on, in all its meaningless detail.

‘Then, in 1926,’ said Bond, ‘the Allies – Britain with her Empire, and America – opened up the Front in the West again. It has been the Invasion of Europe: the greatest transportation of troops and materiel across water, and through the air, ever seen.

‘At first it went well. The populations of France and Belgium rose up, and the Germans were thrown back –’

‘But not far,’ Filby said. ‘Soon it was 1915 all over again, with two immense armies bogged down in the mud of France and Belgium.’

So the Siege had begun. But now, the resources available to make War were so much greater: the lifeblood of the British Empire and the American continent on the one hand, and of
Mitteleuropa
on the other, was all poured into that awful sink of War.

And then came the War on Civilians, waged in earnest: the aerial torpedoes, the gassing …

‘“
The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings
”,’ Moses quoted grimly.

‘But the people, Filby – what of the people!’

His voice, obscured by the mask, was at once familiar, yet removed from me. ‘There have been popular protests – especially in the late Twenties, I remember. But then they passed Order 1305, which made strikes and lockouts and the rest of it illegal. And that was the end of that! Since then – well, we’ve all simply got on with things, I suppose.’

I became aware that the walls of the tunnel had receded from the window, as if the tunnel were opening out. We seemed to be entering a large, underground chamber.

Bond and Oldfield unbuttoned their masks, with every expression of relief; Filby, too, released his straps, and when his poor old head came free of its moist prison, I could see white marks in his chin where the seal of the mask had dug into him. ‘
That’s
better,’ he said.

‘We’re safe now?’

‘Should be,’ he said. ‘Safe as anywhere!’

I unbuttoned my mask and pulled it free; Moses shed his quickly, then helped the Morlock. When Nebogipfel’s little face was exposed, Oldfield, Bond and Filby all stared quite openly – I could not blame them! – until Moses helped him restore his cap and goggles to their appointed sites.

‘Where are we?’ I asked Filby.

‘Don’t you recognize it?’ Filby waved his hand at the darkness beyond the window.

‘I –’

‘It’s Hammersmith, old man. We’ve just crossed the river.’

Hilary Bond explained to me, ‘It is the Hammersmith Gate. We have reached the Dome of London.’