The Time Ships (26 page)

I
awoke to find Moses with his hands under my armpits, dragging me from beneath fallen bodies. My foot caught on something – I think it was a bicycle-frame – and I cried out; Moses gave me a moment to twist my foot free of the obstruction, and then he hauled me free.

‘Are you all right?’ He touched my forehead with his finger-tips, and they came away bloody. He had lost his knapsack, I saw.

I felt dizzy, and a huge pain seemed to be hovering around my head, waiting to descend; I knew that when I lost this momentary numbness, I should suffer indeed. But there was no time. ‘Where’s Nebogipfel?’

‘Here.’

The Morlock stood in the street, unharmed; he had lost his cap, though, and his goggles were starred by some flying fragment. His notes were scattered about, their file having burst, and Nebogipfel watched the pages blow away.

People had been scattered like skittles by the blast and concussion. All round us, they lay in awkward positions, with body on top of body, flung arm, twisted feet, open mouth, staring eyes, old men on top of young women, a child lying on a soldier’s back. There was much stirring and groaning, as people struggled to rise – I was reminded of nothing
so much as a heap of insects, squirming over each other – and here and there I saw splashes of blood, dark against flesh and clothing.

‘My God,’ Moses said with feeling. ‘We have to help these people. Can you see –?’

‘No,’ I snapped at him. ‘We
can’t
– there are too many; there’s nothing we can do. We’re lucky to be alive – don’t you see that? And now that the guns have got their range – Come! We have to stick to our intention; we have to escape from here, and into time.’

‘I can’t bear it,’ Moses said. ‘I’ve never seen such sights.’

The Morlock came up to us now. ‘I fear there’s worse to see before we’re done with this century of yours,’ he said grimly.

So we went on. We stumbled over a road surface become slippery with blood and excrement. We passed a boy, moaning and helpless, evidently with a shattered leg; despite my earlier admonitions, Moses and I were quite unable to resist his plaintive weeping and cries for help, and we bent to lift him from where he lay, close to the body of a milkman, and we sat him up against a wall. A woman emerged from the crowd, saw the child’s plight and came to him; she began to wipe his face with a handkerchief.

‘Is she his mother?’ Moses asked me.

‘I don’t know. I –’

That odd, liquid voice sounded behind us, like a call from another world. ‘
Come
.’

We went on, and at length we reached the corner of Queen’s Gate with the Terrace; and we saw how this had been the epicentre of the blast.

‘No gas, at least,’ I said.

‘No,’ Moses said, his voice tight. ‘But – oh, God! – this is enough!’

There was a crater, torn into the road surface, a few
feet across. Doors were beaten in, and there was not a window left intact as far as I could see; curtains dangled, useless. There were subsidiary craters in the pavements and walls, left by bits of shrapnel from the exploded shell.

And the people …

Sometimes language is incapable of portraying the full horror of a scene; sometimes the communication of remembered events between humans, which is the basis of our shared society, breaks down. This was one such time. I could not communicate the horror of that London street to anyone who did not witness it.

Heads were blown off. One lay on the pavement, quite neatly, beside a small suitcase. Arms and legs littered the scene, most still clothed; here I saw one outstretched limb with a watch at the wrist – I wondered if it was still working! – and here, on a small, detached hand which lay close to the crater, I saw fingers curled upwards like a flower’s petals. To describe it so sounds absurd – comical! Even at the time I had to force myself to understand that these detached
components
had comprised, a few minutes ago, conscious human beings, each with a life and hope of his own. But these bits of cooling flesh seemed no more human to me than the pieces of a smashed-up bicycle, which I saw scattered across the road.

I had never seen such sights before; I felt detached from it all, as if I were moving through the landscape of a dream – but I knew that I should forever revisit this carnage in my soul. I thought of the Interior of the Morlocks’ Sphere, and imagined it as a bowl filled with a million points of horror and suffering, each as ghastly as this. And the thought that such madness could descend on London –
my
London –
filled me with an anguish that caused a sensation of actual physical pain in my throat.

Moses was pallid, and his skin was covered by a sheen of fine sweat and dust; his eyes were huge and flickered about, staring. I glanced at Nebogipfel. Behind his goggles, his large eyes were unblinking as he surveyed that awful carnage; and I wondered if he had begun to believe that I had transported him – not into the past – but to some lower Circle of Hell.

W
e struggled through the last few dozen yards to the walls of Imperial College; and there we found, to my dismay, our way blocked by a soldier, masked and with a rifle. This fellow – stout-hearted, but evidently quite without imagination – had stayed at his post, while the gutters of the street before him had turned red with blood. His eyes became huge, behind their protective discs of glass, at the sight of Nebogipfel.

He did not recognize me, and he adamantly would not let us pass without the proper authority.

There was another whistle in the air; we all cringed – even the soldier clutched his weapon to his chest like a totemic shield – but, this time, the shell fell some distance from us; there was a flash, a smash of glass, a shudder of the ground.

Moses stepped up to the soldier with his fists clenched. His distress at the bombing seemed to have metamorphosed into anger. ‘Did you hear that, you confounded uniformed flunky?’ he bellowed. ‘It’s all chaos anyway! What are you guarding? What’s the point any more? Can’t you
see
what’s happening?’

The guard pointed his rifle at Moses’s chest. ‘I’m warning you, chappy –’

‘No, he
doesn’t
see.’ I interposed myself between Moses and the soldier; I was dismayed by Moses’s evident lack of control, regardless of his distress.

Nebogipfel said, ‘We may find another way. If the College walls are breached –’

‘No,’ I said with determination. ‘This is the route I know.’ I stepped up to the soldier. ‘Look, Private, I don’t have authority to pass you – but I have to assure you I’m important for the War Effort.’

Behind the soldier’s mask, his eyes narrowed.

‘Make a call,’ I insisted. ‘Send for Dr Wallis. Or Professor Gödel. They’ll vouch for me – I’m sure of it! Please check, at least.’

At length – and with his gun pointed at us – the trooper backed into his doorway, and lifted a light telephone receiver from the wall.

It took him several minutes to complete the call. I waited with mounting anguish; I could not have borne to be kept away from an escape into time by such a pettifogging obstacle – not after having made it through so much! At last, grudgingly, he said: ‘You’re to go to Dr Wallis’s office.’ And with that our simple, brave soldier stood aside, and we stepped out of the chaos of that street and into the comparative calm of Imperial College.

‘We’ll report to Wallis,’ I told him. ‘Don’t worry. Thank you …!’

We entered that maze of enclosed corridors I have described earlier.

Moses let out a grunt of relief. ‘Just our luck,’ he said, ‘to come up against the only soldier still at his post in all of confounded London! The hopeless little fool –’

‘How can you be so contemptuous?’ I snapped. ‘He is a common man, doing the job he’s been given as best he can, in the middle of all this – a madness not of his making! What more do you want from a man? Eh?’

‘Huh! How about imagination? Flair, intelligence, initiative –’

We had come to a halt and stood nose to nose.

‘
Gentlemen
,’ Nebogipfel said. ‘Is this the time for such navel-gazing?’

Moses and I stared at the Morlock, and at each other. In Moses’s face, I saw a sort of vulnerable fear which he masked with this anger – looking into his eyes was like peering into a cage at a terrified animal – and I nodded at him, trying to transmit reassurance.

The moment passed, and we moved apart.

‘Of course,’ I said in an attempt to break the tension, ‘you never do any navel-gazing, do you, Nebogipfel?’

‘No,’ the Morlock said easily. ‘For one thing I do not have a navel.’

We hurried on. We reached the central office block and set off in search of Wallis’s room. We moved through carpeted corridors, past rows of brass-plated doors. The lights were still burning – I imagined the College had its own, secured supply of electricity – and the carpet deadened our footsteps. We saw no one about. Some of the office doors were open, and there were signs of hasty departure: a spilled cup of tea, a cigarette burning down in an ash tray, papers scattered across floors.

It was hard to believe that carnage reigned only a few dozen yards away!

We came to an opened door; a bluish flicker emanated from it. When we reached the doorway, the single occupant – it was Wallis – was perched on the corner of the desk. ‘Oh! – it’s you. I’m not sure I expected to see you again.’ He wore his wire spectacles, and a tweed jacket over a woollen tie; he had one epaulette attached and his gas mask on the desk beside him; he was evidently in the midst of preparations to evacuate the building with the rest, but he had let himself be distracted. ‘This is a desperate business,’ he said. ‘Desperate!’ Then he looked at us
more closely – it was as if he was seeing us for the first time. ‘Good God, you’re in a state!’

We moved into the room, and I could see that the blue flickering came from the screen of a small, glass-fronted box. The screen showed a view down a stretch of river, presumably the Thames, in rather grainy detail.

Moses leaned forward, with his hands on his knees, the better to see the little set. ‘The focus is pretty poor,’ he said, ‘but it’s quite a novelty.’

Despite the urgency of the moment, I too was intrigued by the device. This was evidently the picture-carrying development of the phonograph which Filby had mentioned.

Wallis snapped a switch on his desk, and the picture changed; it was the same in its broad details – the river, winding through built-over landscape – but the lighting was a little brighter. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I’ve been watching this film over and over since it happened. I really can’t quite believe my eyes … Well,’ he said, ‘if we can dream up such things, I suppose
they
can too!’

‘Who?’ Moses asked.

‘The Germans, of course. The blessed Germans! Look: this view is from a camera fixed up at the top of the Dome. We’re looking east, beyond Stepney – you can see the curve of the river. Now: look here – in she comes –’

We saw a flying machine, a black, cross-shaped craft, sweeping low over the shining river. It came in from the east.

‘You see, it’s not easy to Bomb a Dome,’ Wallis said. ‘Well, that’s the point, of course. The whole thing’s pretty much solid masonry, and it’s all held together by gravity as much as by steel; any small breaches tend to heal themselves …’

Now the flying machine dropped a small package
towards the water. The image was grainy, but the package looked cylindrical, and it was glinting in the sunlight, as if spinning as it fell.

Wallis went on, ‘The fragments from an air-burst will simply hail off the concrete, by and large. Even a Bomb placed, somehow, directly against the face of the Dome won’t harm it, in ordinary instances, because so much of the blast goes off into the air – do you see?

‘But there is a way. I knew it!
The Rota-Mine
– or Surface Torpedo … I wrote up a proposal myself, but it never progressed, and I had no energy – not with this DChronW business as well … Where the Dome meets the river, you see, the carapace extends
beneath
the surface of the water. The purpose is to keep out attack by submersibles and so forth. Structurally the whole thing is like a dam.

‘Now – if you can place your Bomb against the part of the Dome
beneath
the water …’ Wallis spread his large, cultured hands to mime it. ‘Then the water will
help
you, you see; it contains the blast and directs the energy inward, into the structure of the Dome.’

On the screen, the package – the German Bomb – struck the water. And it
bounced
, in a mist of silvery spray, and leapt on, over the surface of the water, towards the Dome. The flying machine tipped to its right and swept away, quite graceful, leaving its Rota-Mine to stride on towards the Dome in successive parabolic arcs.

‘But how to deliver a Bomb, accurately, to such an inaccessible place?’ Wallis mused. ‘You can’t simply drop the thing. Sticks end up scattered all over the shop … If you drop a mine even from a modest height of, say, fifteen thousand feet, a crosswind of just ten miles an hour will create two hundred yards’ inaccuracy.

‘But then it came to me,’ he said. ‘Give it a bit of back-spin, and your Bomb could
bounce
over the water – one can work out the laws of ricochet with a bit of experiment and make it all quite accurate … Did I tell you about my experiments at home on this subject, with my daughter’s marbles?

‘The Mine bounces its way to the foot of the Dome, and then slides down its face,
under
the water, until it reaches the required depth … And there it is. A perfect placement!’ He beamed, and with his shock of white hair and those uneven glasses, he looked quite avuncular.

Moses squinted at the imprecise images. ‘But this Bomb looks to me as if it’s going to fail … Its bounces will surely leave it short …
ah
.’

Now a plume of smoke, brilliant white even in the poor image, had burst from the back of the Rota-Mine. The Bomb leapt across the water, as if invigorated.

Wallis smiled. ‘Those Germans – you have to admire them. Even
I
never thought of that little wrinkle …’

The Rota-Mine, its rocket-engine still blazing, passed beneath the curve of the Dome and out of sight of the camera. And then the image shuddered, and the screen filled with a formless blue light.

Barnes Wallis sighed. ‘They’ve done for us, it looks like!’

‘What about the German shelling?’ Moses asked.

‘The guns?’ Wallis scarcely sounded interested. ‘Probably hundred-and-five-mil Light-Gun 42s, dropped in by paratroop units. All in advance of the Invasion by Sea and Air that’s to follow, I don’t doubt.’ He took off his glasses and began to polish them on the end of his tie. ‘We’re not finished yet. But this is a desperate business. Very bad indeed …’

‘Dr Wallis,’ I said, ‘what about Gödel?’

‘Hum? Who?’ He looked at me from large, fatigue-rimmed eyes. ‘Oh, Gödel. What about him?’

‘Is he here?’

‘Yes, I should think so. In his office.’

Moses and Nebogipfel made for the door; Moses indicated, urgently, that I should follow. I held up my hand.

‘Dr Wallis – won’t you come with us?’

‘Whatever for?’

‘We might be stopped before we reach Gödel. We must find him.’

He laughed and thrust his glasses back over his nose. ‘Oh, I don’t think security and any of
that
matters very much any more. Do you? Anyway – here.’ He reached up to his lapel and tugged free the numbered button that was clipped there. ‘Take this – tell them I’m authorizing you – if you meet anyone mad enough to be at his post.’

‘You might surprised,’ I said with feeling.

‘Hum?’ He turned back to his television set. Now it was showing a random assortment of scenes, evidently taken from a series of cameras about the Dome: I saw flying machines take to the air like black gnats, and lids in the ground which were drawn back to reveal a host of Juggernaut machines which toiled out of the ground, spitting steam, to draw up in a line which stretched, it seemed to me, from Leytonstone to Bromley; and all this great horde pressed forward, breaking up the earth, to meet the invading Germans. But then Wallis pressed a switch, and these fragments of Armageddon were banished, as he made his record of the Rota-Mine run through again.

‘A desperate business,’ he said. ‘We could have had it first! But what a marvellous development … even I wasn’t sure if it could be
done
.’ His gaze was
locked on the screen, his eyes hidden by the flickering, meaningless reflection of the images.

And that was how I left him; with an odd impulse towards pity, I closed his office door softly behind me.