The Time Ships (21 page)

T
he London Dome!

Nothing in my own time had prepared me for this stupendous feat of construction.
Picture it
: a great pie-dish of concrete and steel almost two miles across, stretching across the city from Hammersmith to Stepney, and from Islington to Clapham … The streets were broken everywhere by pillars, struts and buttresses which thrust down into the London clay, dominating and confining the populace like the legs of a crowd of giants.

The train moved on, beyond Hammersmith and Fulham, and deeper into the Dome. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I began to see how the street-lights traced out an image of a London I could still recognize: ‘Here is Kensington High Street, beyond this fence! And is that Holland Park?’ – and so forth. But for all the familiar landmarks and street names, this was a new London: a London of permanent night, a city which could never enjoy the glow of the June sky outside – but a London which had accepted all this as the price for survival, Filby told me; for bombs and torpedoes would roll off that massive Roof, or burst in the air harmlessly, leaving Cobbett’s ‘Great Wen’ unmarked beneath.

Everywhere, Filby said, the cities of men – which had once blazed with light, turning the night-side of our turning world into a glowing jewel – had been
covered by such brooding, obscuring Shells; now, men hardly moved between the great Dome-cities, preferring to cower in their man-made Darkness.

Our new train line appeared to have been slashed through the old pattern of streets. The roads we passed over were quite crowded, but with people on foot or on bicycles; I saw no carriages, drawn either by horse or by motor, as I had expected. There were even rickshaws! – light carriages, pulled by sweating, scrawny Cockneys, squirming around the obstacles posed by the Dome’s pillars.

Watching the crowds from the window of my slowing train, I caught a sense, despite the general bustle and busy-ness, of despondency, down-heartedness, disillusion … I saw down-turned heads, slumped shoulders, lined, weary faces; there was a certain doggedness, it seemed to me, as people went about their lives; but there seemed to me – and it was not surprising – little
joy
.

It was striking that there were no children, anywhere to be seen. Bond told me that the schools were mostly underground now, for greater protection against the possibility of bombs, while the parents worked in the munitions factories, or in the huge aerodromes which had sprung up around London, at Balham, Hackney and Wembley. Well, perhaps that was a safer arrangement – but what a bleak place the city was without the laughter of running children! – as even I, a contented bachelor, was prepared to concede. And what kind of preparation for life were those poor subterranean mites receiving?

Again, I thought, my travels had landed me in a world of rayless obscurity – a world a Morlock would have enjoyed. But the people who had built this great edifice were no Morlocks: they were my own species, cowed by War into relinquishing the Light which was
their birthright! A deep and abiding depression settled over me, a mood which was to linger for much of my stay in 1938.

Here and there, I saw rather more direct evidence of the horror of War. In Kensington High Street I saw one chap making his way along the road – he had to be helped, by a thin young woman at his side – his lips were thin and stretched, and his eyes were like beads in shrunken sockets. The skin of his face was a pattern of marks in purple and white on the underlying grey.

Filby sniffed when I pointed this out. ‘
War Burns
,’ he said. ‘They always look the same … An aerial fighter, probably – a young gladiator, whose exploits we all adore when the Babble Machines shout about them! – and yet where is there for them to go after-wards?’ He glanced at me, and laid a withered hand on my arm. ‘I don’t mean to sound unfeeling, my dear chap. I’m still the Filby you used to know. It’s just – God! – it’s just that one has to steel oneself.’

Most of the old buildings of London seemed to have survived, although, I saw, some of the taller constructions had been torn down to allow the concrete carapace to grow over – I wondered if Nelson’s Column still stood! – and the new buildings were small, beetling and drab. But there were some scars left by the early days of the War, before the Dome’s completion: great bomb-sites, like vacant eye-sockets, and mounds of rubble which no-one had yet had the wit or energy to fill.

The Dome reached its greatest height of two hundred feet or so directly above Westminster at the heart of London; as we neared the centre of town, I saw beams of brilliant lights flickering up from the central streets and splashing that universal Roof with illumination. And everywhere, protruding from the streets of London and from immense foundation-rafts
on the river, there were those pillars: rough-hewn, crowding, with splayed and buttressed bases – ten thousand concrete Atlases to support that roof, pillars which had turned London into an immense Moorish temple.

I wondered if the basin of chalk and soft clay in which London rested could support this colossal weight! What if the whole arrangement were to sink into the mud, dragging its precious cargo of millions of lives with it? I thought with some wistfulness of that Age of Building which was to come, when the glimpses I had seen of the mastery of gravity would render a construction like this Dome into a trivial affair …

Yet, despite the crudity and evident haste of its construction, and the bleakness of its purpose, I found myself impressed by the Dome. Because it was all hewn out of simple stone and fixed to the London clay with little more than the expertise of my own century, that brooding edifice was more remarkable to me than all the wonders I had seen in the Year A.D. 657,208!

We travelled on, but we were evidently close to journey’s end, for the train moved at little more than walking pace. I saw there were shops open, but their windows were scarcely a blaze of light; I saw dummies wearing more of the drab clothes of the day, and shoppers peering through patched-up glass panes. There was little left of luxury, it seemed, in this long and bitter War.

The train drew to a halt. ‘Here we are,’ said Bond. ‘This is Canning Gate: just a few minutes’ walk to Imperial College.’ Trooper Oldfield pushed at the carriage door – it opened with a distinct pop, as if the pressure in this Dome were high – and a flood of noise burst in over us. I saw more soldiers, these
dressed in the drab olive battle-dress of infantrymen, waiting for us on the platform.

So, grasping my borrowed gas-mask, I stepped out into the London Dome.

The noise was astonishing! – that was my first impression. It was like being in some immense crypt, shared with millions of others. A hubbub of voices, the squealing of train wheels and the hum of trams: all of it seemed to rattle around that vast, darkened Roof and shower down over me. It was immensely hot – hotter than the
Raglan
had been. There was a warm array of scents, not all of them pleasant: of cooking food, of ozone from some machinery, of steam and oil from the train – and, above all, of
people
, millions of them breathing and perspiring their way through that great, enclosed blanket of air.

There were lights placed here and there in the architecture of the Dome itself: not enough to illuminate the streets below, but enough that one could make out its shape. I saw little forms up there, fluttering between the lights: they were the pigeons of London, Filby told me – still surviving, though now etiolated by their years of darkness – and the pigeons were interspersed with a few colonies of bats, who had made themselves unpopular in some districts.

In one corner of the Roof, to the north, a projected light-show was playing. I heard the echoing of some amplified voice from that direction, too. Filby called this the ‘Babble Machine’ – it was a sort of public kinematograph, I gathered – but it was too remote to make out any details.

I saw that our new light rail track had been gouged, quite crudely, through the old road surface; and that this ‘station’ was little more than a splash of concrete in the middle of Canning Place. Everything about the changes which had wrought this new world spoke of haste and panic.

The soldiers formed up into a little diamond around us, and we walked away from the station and along Canning Place towards Gloucester Road. Moses had his fists clenched. In his bright-coloured masher’s costume he looked scared and vulnerable, and I felt a pang of guilt that I had brought him to this harsh world of metal epaulettes and gas-masks.

I glanced along De Vere Gardens to the Kensington Park Hotel, where I had been accustomed to dine in happier times; the pillared porticoes of that place still stood, but the front of the building had become shabby, and many of the windows were boarded up, and the Hotel appeared to have become part of the new railway terminus.

We turned into Gloucester Road. There were many people passing here, on the pavement and in the road, and the tinkling of bicycle bells was a cheerful counterpoint to the general sense of despondency. Our tight little party – and Moses in his gaudy costume in particular – were treated to many extended stares, but nobody came too close, or spoke to us. There were plenty of soldiers hereabouts, in drab uniforms similar to those of the ’Naut crew, but most of the men wore suits which – if rather plain and ill-cut – would not have looked out of place in 1891. The women wore delicate skirts and blouses, quite plain and functional, and the only source of shock in this was that most of the skirts were cut quite high, to within three or four inches of the knee, so that there were more feminine calves and ankles on display in a few yards than, I think, I had ever seen in my life! (This latter was not of much interest to me, against the background of so much Change; but it was, apparently, of rather more fascination to Moses, and I found the way he stared rather ungentlemanly.)

But, uniformly, all the pedestrians wore those odd metal epaulettes, and all lugged about, even in this summer heat, heavy webbing cases bearing their gas-masks.

I became aware that our soldiers had their holsters open, to a man; I realized that the weapons were not intended for us, for I could see the thin eyes of the soldiers as they surveyed the crush of people close to us.

We turned east along Queen’s Gate Terrace. This was a part of London I had been familiar with. It was a wide, elegant street lined by tall terraces; and I saw that the houses here were pretty much untouched by the intervening time. The fronts of the houses still sported the mock Greco-Roman ornamentation I remembered – pillars carved with floral designs, and the like – and the pavement was lined by the same black-painted area rails.

Bond stopped us at one of these houses, half-way along the street. She climbed the step to the front door and rapped on it with a gloved hand; a soldier – another private, in battle-dress – opened it from within. Bond said to us, ‘All the houses here were requisitioned by the Air Ministry, a while ago. You’ll have everything you need – just ask the privates – and Filby will stay with you.’

Moses and I exchanged glances. ‘But what are we to
do
now?’ I asked.

‘Just wait,’ she said. ‘Freshen up – get some sleep. Heaven knows what hour your bodies think it is! … I’ve had instructions from the Air Ministry; they are very interested in meeting you,’ she told me. ‘A scientist from the Ministry is taking charge of your case. He will be here to see you in the morning.

‘Well. Good luck – perhaps we’ll meet again.’ And with that, she shook my hand, and Moses’s, in a manly fashion, and she called Trooper Oldfield to
her; and they set off down the Mews once more, two young warriors erect and brave – and every bit as fragile as that War-Burned wretch I had seen earlier in Kensington High Street.

F
ilby showed us around the house. The rooms were large, clean and bright, though the curtains were drawn. The house was furnished comfortably but plainly, in a style that would not have seemed out of place in 1891; the chief difference was a proliferation of new electrical gadgets, especially a variety of lights and other appliances, such as a large cooker, refrigerating boxes, fans and heaters.

I went to the window of the dining-room and pulled back its heavy curtain. The window was a double layer of glass, sealed around its rim with rubber and leather – there were seals around the door-frames too – and beyond, on this English June evening, there was only the darkness of the Dome, broken by the distant flickering of light beams on the roof. And under the window I found a box, disguised by an inlaid pattern, which contained a rack of gasmasks.

Still, with the curtains drawn and the lights bright, it was possible to forget, for a while, the bleakness of the world beyond these walls!

There was a smoking-room which was well stocked with books and newspapers; Nebogipfel studied these, evidently uncertain as to their function. There was also a large cabinet faced with multiple grilles: Moses opened this up, to find a bewildering landscape of valves, coils and cones of blackened paper.
This device turned out to be called a phonograph. It was the size and shape of a Dutch clock, and down the front of it were electric barometric indicators, an electric clock and calendar, and various engagement reminders; and it was capable of receiving speech, and even music, broadcast by a sophisticated extension of the wireless-telegraphy of my day, with high faithfulness. Moses and I spent some time with this device, experimenting with its controls. It could be tuned to receive radio-waves of different frequencies by means of an adjustable capacitor – this ingenious device enabled the resonant frequency of the tuned circuits to be chosen by the listener – and there turned out to be a remarkable number of broadcasting stations: three or four at least!

Filby had fixed himself a whisky-and-water, and he watched us experiment, indulgent. ‘The phonograph is a marvellous thing,’ he said. ‘Turns us all into one people – don’t you think? – although all the stations are MoI, of course.’

‘MoI?’

‘Ministry of Information.’ Filby then tried to engage our interest by telling us of the development of a new type of phonograph which could carry pictures. ‘It was a fad before the War, but it never caught on because of the distortion of the Domes. And if you want pictures, there’s always the Babble Machine – eh? All MoI stuff again, of course – but if you like stirring speeches by politicians and soldiers, and encouraging homilies from the Great and Good, then it’s your thing!’ He swigged his whisky and grimaced. ‘But what can you expect? – it’s a War, after all.’

Moses and I soon tired of the phonograph’s stream of bland news, and of the sounds of rather feeble orchestras drifting in the air, and we turned the device off.

We were given a bedroom each. There were changes of underclothes for us all – even the Morlock – though the garments were clearly hastily assembled and ill-fitting. One private, a narrow-faced boy called Puttick, was to stay with us in the house; although he wore his battle-dress whenever I saw him, this Puttick served pretty well as a manservant and cook. There were always other soldiers outside the house, though, and in the Terrace beyond. It was pretty clear we were under guard – or prisoners!

Puttick called us into the dining room for dinner at around seven. Nebogipfel did not join us. He asked only for water and a plate of uncooked vegetables; and he stayed in the smoking-room, his goggles still clamped to his hairy face, and he listened to the phonograph and studied magazines.

Our meal proved to be plain though palatable, with as centrepiece a plate of what looked like roast beef, with potatoes, cabbage and carrots. I picked at the meat-stuff; it fell apart rather easily, and its fibres were short and soft. ‘What’s this?’ I asked Filby.

‘Soya.’

‘What?’

‘
Soya-beans
. They are grown all over the country, out of the Domes – even the Oval cricket ground has been given over to their production! – for meat isn’t so easy to come by, these days. It’s hard to persuade the sheep and cattle to keep their gas-masks on, you know!’ He cut off a slice of this processed vegetable and popped it into his mouth. ‘Try it! – it’s palatable enough; these modern food mechanics are quite ingenious.’

The stuff had a dry, crumbling texture on my tongue, and its flavour made me think of damp cardboard.

‘It’s not so bad,’ Filby said bravely. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

I could not find a reply. I washed the stuff down with the wine – it tasted like a decent Bordeaux, though I forbore to ask its provenance – and the rest of the meal passed in silence.

I took a brief bath – there was hot water from the taps, a liberal supply of it – and then, after a quick round of brandy and cigars, we retired. Only Nebogipfel stayed up, for Morlocks do not sleep as we do, and he asked for a pad of paper and some pencils (he had to be shown how to use the sharpener and eraser).

I lay there, hot in that narrow bed, with the windows of my room sealed shut, and the air becoming steadily more stuffy. Beyond the walls the noise of this War-spoiled London rattled around the confines of its Dome, and through gaps in my curtains I saw the flickering of the Ministry news lamps, deep into the night.

I heard Nebogipfel moving about the smoking-room; strange as it may seem, I found something comforting in the sounds of narrow Morlock feet as they padded about, and the clumsy scratching of his pencils across paper.

At last I slept.

There was a small clock on a table beside my bed, which told me that I woke at seven in the morning; though, of course, it was still as black as the deepest night outside.

I hauled myself out of bed. I put on that battered light suit which had already seen so many adventures, and I dug out a fresh set of underclothes, shirt and tie. The air was clammy, despite the earliness of the hour; I felt cotton-headed and heavy of limb.

I opened the curtain. I saw Filby’s Babble Machine still flickering against the roof; I thought I heard snatches of some stirring music, like a march, no
doubt intended to hasten reluctant workers to another day’s toil on behalf of the War Effort.

I made my way downstairs to the dining room. I found myself alone save for Puttick, the soldier-manservant, who served me with a breakfast of toast, sausages (stuffed with some unidentifiable substitute for meat) and – this was a rare treat, Puttick gave me to believe – an egg, softly fried.

When I was done, I set off, clutching a last piece of toast, for the smoking room. There I found Moses and Nebogipfel, hunched over books and piles of paper on the big desk; cold cups of tea littered the desk’s surface.

‘No sign of Filby?’ I asked.

‘Not yet,’ Moses told me. My younger self wore a dressing gown; he was unshaven, and his hair was mussed.

I sat down at the desk. ‘Confound it, Moses, you look as if you haven’t slept.’

He grinned and drew a hand through the peak of hair over his broad forehead. ‘Well, so I haven’t. I just couldn’t settle – I think I’ve been through rather too much, you know, and my head’s been in something of a spin … I knew Nebogipfel was still up, so I came down here.’ He looked at me out of eyes that were red and black-lined. ‘We’ve had a fascinating night – fascinating! Nebogipfel’s been introducing me to the mysteries of
Quantum Mechanics
.’

‘Of
what
?’

‘Indeed,’ Nebogipfel said. ‘And Moses, in his turn, has been teaching me to read English.’

‘He’s a damned fast learner, too,’ said Moses. ‘He needed little more than the alphabet and a quick tour of the principles of phonetics, and he was off.’

I leafed through the detritus on the desk. There were several sheets of note-paper covered in odd, cryptic symbols: Nebogipfel’s writing, I surmised.
When I held up a sheet I saw how clumsily he had used the pencils; in several places the paper was torn clean through. Well, the poor chap had never before had to make do with any implement so crude as a
pen
or
pencil
; I wondered how
I
should have got on with wielding the flint tools of my own ancestors, who were less remote in time from me than was Nebogipfel from 1938!

‘I’m surprised you’ve not been listening to the phonograph,’ I said to Moses. ‘Are you not interested in the details of this world we find ourselves in?’

Moses replied, ‘But much of its output is either music or fiction – and
that
of the Moralizing, Uplifting sort which I have never found palatable – as
you
know! – and I have become quite overwhelmed with the stream of trivia which masquerades as news. One wants to deal with the great Issues of the Day –
Where are we? How did we get here? Where are we headed
?– and instead one is inundated with a lot of nonsense about train delays and rationing shortfalls and the obscure details of remote military campaigns, whose general background one is expected to know already.’

I patted his arm. ‘What do you expect? Look here: we’re dipping into History, like temporal tourists. People
are
generally obsessed by the surface of things – and rightly so! How often in your own Year do you find the daily newspapers filled with deep analyses of the Causes of History? How much of your own conversation is occupied with explanations as to the general pattern of life in 1873? …’

‘Your point is taken,’ he said. He showed little interest in the conversation; he seemed unwilling to engage much concentration in the world around him. Instead: ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I must tell you something of what your Morlock friend has related of this
new theory.’ His eyes were brighter, his voice clear, and I saw that this was an altogether more palatable subject for him – it was an escape, I supposed, from the complexities of our predicament into the clean mysteries of science.

I resolved to humour him; there would be time enough for him to confront his situation in the days to come. ‘I take it this has some bearing on our current plight –’

‘Indeed it does,’ said Nebogipfel. He ran his stubby fingers over his temples, in a gesture of evident, and very human, weariness. ‘Quantum Mechanics is the framework within which I must construct my understanding of the Multiplicity of Histories which we are experiencing.’

‘It’s a remarkable theoretical development,’ Moses enthused. ‘Quite unforeseen in my day – even unimaginable! – it’s astonishing that the order of things can be overturned with such speed.’

I put down Nebogipfel’s bit of paper. ‘Tell me,’ I said.