The Time Ships (23 page)

T
o the north of the Round Pond rows of dingy canvas deck-chairs had been set out, for the use of those wishing to view the news projected on the roof above us. The chairs were mostly occupied; Wallis paid an attendant – the coins were metal tokens, much smaller than the currency of my day – and we settled in two seats with our heads tipped back.

Our silent soldier-attendants moved into place around us, watching us and the crowd.

Dusty fingers of light reached up from Aldis lamps situated (Wallis said) in Portland Place, and splashed grey and white tones across the Roof. Amplified voices and music washed down over the passive crowd. The Roof had been white-washed hereabouts and so the kinematographic images were quite sharp. The first sequence showed a thin, rather wild-looking man shaking hands with another, and then posing beside what looked like a pile of bricks; the voices were not quite lined up with the movements of the mouths, but the music was stirring, and the general effect was easy to follow.

Wallis leaned over to me. ‘We’re in luck! – it is a feature on Imperial College. That’s Kurt Gödel – a young scientist from Austria. You may meet him. We managed to retrieve Gödel recently from the Reich; apparently he wished to defect because he has some
crazy notion that the Kaiser is dead, and has been replaced by an impostor … Rather an odd chap, between you and me, but a great mind.’

‘
Gödel
?’ I felt a flicker of interest. ‘The chap behind the Incompleteness of Mathematics, and all of that?’

‘Why, yes.’ He looked at me curiously. ‘How do you know about that? – It’s after your time. Well,’ he said, ‘it’s not his achievements in mathematical philosophy we want him for. We’ve put him in touch with Einstein in Princeton –’ I forbore to ask who this
Einstein
was ‘– and he’s going to start up on a line of research he was pursuing in the Reich. It’ll be another way into time travel for us, we hope. It was quite a coup – I imagine the Kaiser’s boys are furious with each other …’

‘And the brick construction beside him? What’s that?’

‘Oh, an experiment.’ He glanced around with caution. ‘I shouldn’t say too much – it’s only on the Babble for a bit of show. It’s all to do with
atomic fission
… I can explain later, if you’re interested. Gödel is particularly keen, apparently, to run experiments with it; in fact I believe we’ve started some tests for him already.’

We were presented, now, with a picture of a troop of rather elderly-looking men in ill-fitting battle-dress, grinning towards the camera. One of them was picked out, a thin, intense-looking chap. Wallis said, ‘The Home Guard … men and women out of serviceable age, who nevertheless do a bit of soldiering, in case the Invasion of England ever comes. That’s Orwell – George Orwell. A bit of a writer – don’t suppose you know him.’

The news seemed to be finished for now, and a new entertainment blossomed over our heads. This turned out to be a
cartoon
– a kind of animated drawing, with a lively musical backing. It featured a charac
ter called Desperate Dan, I gathered, who lived in a crudely-drawn cartoon Texas. After eating a huge cow pie, this Dan tried to knit himself a jumper of wires, using telegraph poles as needles. Inadvertently he created a chain; and when he threw it away in the sea, it sank. Dan fished the chain out – and found that he had snagged no less than three German undersea Juggernauts. A naval gentleman, observing this, gave Dan a reward of fifty pounds … and so forth.

I had supposed this entertainment to be fit only for children, but I saw that adults laughed at it readily enough. I found it all rather crude and coarsely imagined propaganda, and I decided that the common slang epithet of ‘Babble Machine’ suited this kinematographic show rather well.

After this entertainment we were treated to some more snippets of news. I saw a burning city – it might have been Glasgow, or Liverpool – where a glow filled the night sky, and the flames were gigantic. Then there were pictures of children being evacuated from a collapsed Dome in the Midlands. They looked like typical town children to me, grinning into the camera, with their outsize boots and dirty skin – waifs, quite helpless in the tide of this War.

Now we entered a section of the show entitled, according to a caption, ‘Postscript’. First there was a portrait of the King; he was, disconcertingly for me, a skinny chap called Egbert, who turned out to be a remote relation of the old Queen I remembered. This Egbert was one of the few members of the family to have survived audacious German raids in the early days of the War. Meanwhile a plum-voiced actor read us a poem:

‘…
All shall be well and/ All manner of thing shall be well/ When the tongues of flame are in-folded/ Into the crowned knot of fire/ And the fire and the rose are one …
’

And so on! As far as I could make out the piece
was representing the effects of this War as a kind of Purgatory, which in the end would cleanse the souls of Humanity. Once I might have agreed with this argument, I reflected; but after my time in the Sphere’s Interior, I think I had come to regard War as no more or less than a dark excrescence, a flaw of the human soul; and any justification for it was just that – justification, after the fact of it.

I gathered Wallis didn’t make much of this sort of stuff. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Eliot,’ he said, as if that explained it all.

Now there came an image of a man: a rather careworn, jowly old fellow with an unruly moustache, tired eyes, ugly ears and a fierce, frustrated sort of manner. He sat with his pipe in his hand, by a fire-place – the pipe was rather obviously unlit – and he began to proclaim in a frail voice a kind of commentary on the day’s events. I thought the chap looked familiar, but at first I couldn’t place him. He wasn’t much impressed by the efforts of the Reich, it seemed – ‘That vast machine of theirs can’t create a glimmer of that poetry of action which distinguishes War from Mass Murder. It’s a machine – and therefore has no soul.’

He evoked us all to still sterner efforts. He worked the myths of the English countryside – ‘the round green hills dissolving into the hazy blue of the sky’ – and asked us to imagine that English scene torn apart ‘to reveal the old Flanders Front, trenches and bomb craters, ruined towns, a scarred countryside, a sky belching death, and the faces of murdered children’ – all this last pronounced with something of an apocalyptic glee, I thought.

In a burst of realization, I remembered him. It was my old friend the Writer, withered into an old man! ‘Why, isn’t that Mr –?’ I said, naming him.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Did you know him? I suppose you could have … Of course you did! For he wrote up
that popular account of your travels in time. It was serialized in
The New Review
, as I recall; and then put out as a book. That was quite a turning point for me, you know, to come across that … Poor chap’s getting on now, of course – I don’t think he was ever all that healthy – and his fiction isn’t what it was, in my view.’

‘No?’

‘Too much lecturing and not enough action – you know the type! Still, his works of popular science and history have been well received. He’s a good friend of Churchill – I mean the First Lord of the Admiralty – and I suspect your pal has had a great deal of influence on official thinking on the shape of things to come, after the War is done. You know – when we reach the “Uplands of the Future”,’ Wallis said, quoting some other speech of my former friend’s. ‘He’s working on a Declaration of Human Rights, or some such, to which we all must adhere after the War – you know the sort of dreamy affair. But he’s not so effective a speaker. Priestley’s my favourite of that type.’

We listened to the Writer’s perorations for several minutes. For my part, I was gladdened that my old friend had survived the vicissitudes of this grisly history, and had even found a meaningful role for himself – but I was helplessly saddened to see what time had done to the eager young man I had known! As when I had met Filby, I felt a stab of pity for the anonymous multitudes around me, embedded in slow-oozing time and doomed to inexorable decay. And it was a ghastly irony, I thought, that a man with such strong faith in the perfectibility of man should find the greater part of his lifetime dominated by the greatest War in history.

‘Come on,’ Wallis said briskly. ‘Let’s walk some more. The shows here repeat themselves pretty quickly anyway …’

Wallis told me more of his background. In the Weybridge Bunker, working for the Vickers-Armstrong Company, he had become a designer of aeronautical devices of some reputation – he was known as a ‘wizard boffin’, in his words.

As the War had dragged on, Wallis’s evidently fertile brain had turned to schemes of how its end might be accelerated. He had considered, for instance, how one might go about destroying the enemy’s sources of energy – reservoirs, dams, mines and such-like – by means of massive explosives to be dropped from the stratosphere by ‘Monster Bomber’ flying machines. To this end he had gone into studies of the Variation of Wind Speed with Height, the Visibility of Objects from Great Heights, and the Effect of Earth Waves on Coal-mine Shafts, and so forth. ‘
You
can see the possibilities of such things, can’t you? One just needs the right sort of imagination. With ten tons of explosives one could divert the course of the Rhine!’

‘And what was the reaction to these proposals?’

He sighed. ‘Resources are always scarce during wars – even for priority schemes – and for unproven ventures like this …“Moonshine”, they called it. “Tripe of the wildest description …” and there was a lot of talk from the military types about “inventors” like me “throwing away” the lives of “their boys”.’ I could see he was hurt by this memory. ‘
You
know that men such as you and I must expect scepticism … but still!’

But Wallis had persevered with his studies, and at last he had been given the go-ahead to build his ‘Monster Bomber’. ‘It is called the
Victory
,’ he said. ‘With a bomb-load of twenty thousand pounds, and operating at forty thousand feet, it can travel at over three hundred miles per hour and has a range of four thousand miles. It is a magnificent sight at take
off – with its six Hercules engines blazing away, it takes no less than two-thirds of a mile to lumber into the air … and the Earthquake Bombs it can deliver have already begun to wreak havoc, deep in the heart of the Reich!’ His deep, handsome eyes gleamed behind his dusty glasses.

Wallis had thrown himself into the development of the
Victory
air machine for some years. But then his track had turned, for he came across that popular account of my time travels, and he had immediately seen the possibilities of adapting my machine for War.

This time his ideas had received a decent hearing – his stock was high, and it didn’t take much imagination to see the limitless military potential of a Time Machine – and the Directorate of Chronic-Displacement Warfare was set up with Wallis as the civilian head of research. The first action of the DChronW was to sequestrate my old house, which had stood abandoned in Richmond since my departure into time, and the relics of my research were dug out.

‘But what do you want of me? You have a Time Machine already – the Juggernaut that brought me here.’

He clasped his hands behind his back, his face long and serious. ‘The
Raglan
. Of course – but you’ve seen that beast for yourself. As far as its time-travelling abilities go, it was constructed solely with the scrap that was found in the ruins of your laboratory. Bits of quartz and brass, doped with Plattnerite – impossible to balance or calibrate – the
Raglan
is a lumbering beast which can reach barely a half-century away from the present. We dared risk the ’Naut for no more than to try to ensure that there was no anachronistic interference by our enemies with the development of your original machine. But now – by chance! – it has brought us you.

‘Already we can do more, of course: we have stripped the Plattnerite from your old machine, and have lodged the hull in the Imperial War Museum. Would you like to see it? It will be an honoured exhibit.’

I was pained at the thought of such an end for my faithful chariot – and disturbed at the destruction of my only route away from 1938! I shook my head stiffly.

Wallis went on, ‘We need you to generate more of the substance you called Plattnerite – tons of it – show us how!’ So Wallis thought
I
had manufactured the Plattnerite? … I kept the thought to myself. He went on, ‘We want to take your Time Machine technology, and extend it – put it to uses beyond, perhaps, your most extraordinary dreams …

‘With a CDV one might bomb History and change its course – it is just like my scheme to divert the Rhine! Why not? – if it can be conceived, it should be done. It’s the most exciting technical challenge you can imagine –
and
it’s all for the benefit of the War Effort.’

‘
Bomb
History?’

‘Think of it – one might go back and intervene in the early stages of the War. Or assassinate Bismarck – why not? what a prank that would be – and put a stop to the formation of Germany in the first place.

‘Can you see it, sir?
A Time Machine is a weapon against which there can be no defence
. Whoever first develops a reliable Chronic-Displacement technology will be the Master of the World – and that Master must be Britain!’

His eyes shone, and I began to find his high-altitude enthusiasm for all of this destruction and power rather disturbing.

W
e reached the Lancaster Walk and began our stroll back to the southern boundary of the Park. We were still flanked by our discreet soldiers.

I said, ‘Tell me more of what will be done when Britain and her Allies win this Time War – tell me about your “Uplands of the Future”.’

He rubbed his nose and looked uncertain. ‘I’m no politician, sir. I can’t –’

‘No, no. Give me your own words.’

‘Very well.’ He looked up at the Dome. ‘To begin with – this War has stripped away a lot of our fond illusions, you know.’

‘It has?’ I thought that an ominous preamble – and my fears were soon justified!

‘The Fallacy of Democracy, for one thing. You see, it is now clear that is no good
asking
people what they want. You have first to think out what they
ought
to want if society is to be saved. Then you have to
tell
them what they want and see that they get it.

‘I know this may seem odd for a man of your century,’ he said, ‘but it’s the modern thinking – and I’ve heard your famous friend espouse much the same views on the phonograph before! – and he’s of your time, isn’t he?

‘I know little of History, but it seems to me that the Modern State which we’re developing in Britain and America – the form of things we intend to share with
the rest of the world – is more like the Republics of antiquity – Carthage, Athens, Rome – which were essentially aristocratic, you see. We have Members of Parliament still, but they are no longer nominated by anything so crude as popular suffrage.

‘And all that old business of Opposition – well! We’ve given all of that up. Look, men like you and me know that about most affairs there can be no two respectable and opposed opinions. There is one sole
right
way and endless
wrong
ways of doing things. A government is trying to go the right way, or it is criminal. That is all there is to it. The Opposition of the past was mostly just a spoiling job done for advancement. And the sabotage must cease.

‘And some of the younger folk are going much further, in their thinking on the future. The family, for instance, is dissolving – so they say. It was the common social cell, if you like, through all our agricultural past. But now, in our modern world, the family is losing its distinctness, and has been dissolving into larger systems of relationships. The domestication of all our young people, including the women, is diminishing greatly.’

I thought, at that, of Captain Hilary Bond. ‘But what’s to
replace
the family?’

‘Well, the outlines aren’t clear, but the youngsters are talking of a
re-nucleation
of society around different seeds: teachers, writers, talkers, who will lead us into a new way of thinking – and get us away from this old tribalism and into a better way.’

‘“Uplands”, indeed.’ I doubted that much – or any! – of this philosophizing originated with Wallis himself; he was acting simply as a mirror of his times, as moulded by the chattering opinion-makers in Government and beyond. ‘And how do
you
feel about all this?’

‘Me?’ He laughed, self-deprecating. ‘Oh, I’m too
old to change – and,’ his voice was uneven, ‘I’d hate to lose my daughters … But, likewise, I don’t want to see them growing up in a world like –’ he waved a hand at the Dome, the dead Park, the soldiers ‘– like this! And if that means changing the heart of man, then so be it.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘can you see why we need your cooperation? With such a weapon as a CDV – a Time Machine – the establishment of this Modern State becomes, not trivial, but more achievable. And if we fail –’

‘Yes?’

He stopped; we were approaching the south wall of the Park now, and there were few people around. He said in a low voice, ‘We have rumours that the Germans are building a Time Machine of their own. And if they succeed
first
– if the Reich gets functioning Chronic-Displacement Warfare capabilities …’

‘Yes?’

And he painted, for my benefit, a brief but chilling portrait, evidently informed by years of propaganda, of the Time War to come. The old Kaiser’s cold-eyed staff officers would be planning how to project into our noble History their half-doped, crazy lads – their
Time Warriors
. Wallis portrayed these soldiers as if they were bombs with legs; they would swarm forward into a hundred of our ancient battles as if they were death-dealing dolls …

‘They would destroy England – strangle it in its cot. And that’s what we have to stop,’ he said to me. ‘You see that, don’t you? You see it?’

I gazed into his deep, earnest face, quite unable to respond.

Wallis returned me to the house in Queen’s Gate Terrace. ‘I don’t want to press you for a decision on working with me, old man – I know how difficult all
this must be for you; after all, it isn’t your War – but time is short. And yet, what does “time” mean, in such a circumstance? Eh?’

I rejoined my companions in the smoking room. I accepted a whisky-and-water from Filby and threw myself into a chair. ‘It’s so close out there,’ I said. ‘More like Burma! – that damned Dome. And doesn’t it feel odd? Pitch dark outside, and yet it’s only lunch-time.’

Moses glanced up from the volume he was reading. ‘“Experience is as to intensity and not as to duration”,’ he quoted. He grinned at me. ‘Wouldn’t that be a perfect epitaph for a Time Traveller?
Intensity
– that’s what counts.’

‘Who’s the author?’

‘Thomas Hardy. Close to a contemporary of yours, wasn’t he?’

‘I’ve not read him.’

Moses checked the preface. ‘Well, he’s gone now … 1928.’ He closed the book. ‘What did you learn from Wallis?’

I summarized my conversations for them. I concluded, ‘I was glad to get away from him. What a farrago of propaganda and half-baked politics … not to mention the most perfect muddle about causality, and so forth.’

Wallis’s words had deepened the sense of depression I had endured since my arrival here in 1938. It seems to me that there is a fundamental conflict in the heart of man. He is swept along by the forces of his own nature – more than anyone, I have witnessed the remorseless action of the evolutionary currents which pulse through Humanity, deriving even from the primal seas – and yet here were these bright young Britons and Americans, hardened by War, determined to Plan, to Control, to fight against Nature and set themselves and their fellows in a sort of stasis, a frozen Utopia!

If I were a citizen of this new Modern State they intended, I knew, I should soon have become one of the protesting spirits who squirmed in its pitilessly benevolent grip.

But, even as I reflected thus, I wondered, deep in my heart, to what extent I would have fallen into Wallis’s way of thinking – of this Modern State, with its Controls and Plans – before my time-travelling had opened up my eyes to the limitations of Humanity.

‘By the way, Nebogipfel,’ I said, ‘I came across an old friend of ours – Kurt Gödel –’

And the Morlock uttered a queer, gurgling word in his own language; he spun in his chair and stood up in a rapid, liquid movement that made him seem more animal than human. Filby blanched, and I saw Moses’s fingers tighten around the book he held.

‘
Gödel
– is he here?’

‘He’s in the Dome, yes. In fact, he’s not a quarter-mile from this spot – in Imperial College.’ I described the Babble Machine show I had seen.

‘
A fission pile
. That is it,’ hissed Nebogipfel. ‘I understand now. He is the key – Gödel is the key to everything. It must have been him, with his insights into rotating universes –’

‘I don’t see what you’re talking about.’

‘Look: do you want to escape from this dreadful History?’

I did – of course I did! – for a thousand reasons: to escape this dreadful conflict, to try to get home, to put a stop to time travelling before the inception of the insanity of Time War …‘But for that we must find a Time Machine.’

‘Yes. Therefore you must get us to Gödel. You
must
. Now I see the truth.’

‘What truth?’

‘Barnes Wallis was wrong about the Germans.
Their Time Machine is more than a threat.
It has already been built!
’

Now we were all on our feet, and talking at once. ‘What?’ ‘What are you saying?’ ‘How –’

‘Already,’ the Morlock said, ‘we are in a strand of History which has been engineered by the Germans.’

‘How do you know?’ I demanded.

‘Remember that I studied your era in my history,’ he said. ‘And – in
my
history – there was no such European War as this, which has already spanned decades. In my History, there
was
a War in 1914 – but it finished in 1918, with a victory for the Allies over the Germans. A new War started up in 1939, but under a new form of government in Germany. And –’

I felt odd – dizzy – and I felt behind me for a chair and sat down.

Filby looked terrified. ‘Those confounded Germans – I told you! I told you they’d cause trouble!’

Moses said, ‘I wonder if that final battle which Filby described – the
Kaiserschlacht
– was somehow modified in the Germans’ favour. Perhaps the assassination of an Allied commander might have done it …’

‘The bombing in Paris,’ Filby said, confused and wondering. ‘Could that have been it?’

I remembered Wallis’s horrid descriptions, of robotic German soldiers dropping into British History. ‘What are we to do? We must stop this dreadful Time War!’

‘
Get us to Gödel
,’ the Morlock said.

‘But why?’

‘Because it can only be Gödel who has manufactured the Germans’ Plattnerite!’