by Anthology
I said good-bye to my friends at the hotel, and, after an uneventful journey by express train, reached Primburg. Except that it bore a general resemblance to Bridgetown, I can say nothing of it, for we were not permitted to go out of the station whilst waiting for the motor-van to take us across the frontier. I say' us,' because there were about half a dozen other travellers. The fact that not more than half a dozen persons a week travelled from Mecco to Prisa—for this was the main route to the capital of Francaria—was in itself astounding. Even of these, three looked like persons on official business. At Primburg I was spared the indignity of a further medical examination, as I had already obtained the necessary certificate from Dr. Pincher, but nothing could exempt me from the examination which all foreigners had to submit to in order to ensure that they carried nothing out of the country except by leave of the chief inspector of Foreign Observers. My journal had been entrusted to Kwang, and I had nothing else of any importance. I was thoroughly searched, and my clothes and my baggage were closely examined by an official called the Registrar of Travellers.
Although I had spent a considerable time in Francaria I had never before seen Durven. There was now no reason for hurrying on to Prisa, so I decided to spend a day there to look round. I had to report myself to the police, owing to the fact that I had arrived from Meccania, but my credentials proving perfectly satisfactory I was at liberty to go where I liked. It was about four o'clock when I stepped out of the police station, and as it was a bright September afternoon there was still time to walk about for some hours before dark. At first, for about an hour, I could hardly help feeling that I was dreaming. Here I was in the old familiar life of Europe again. The streets of the town seemed full of people, some sauntering about and gossiping with their friends, others shop-gazing, others carrying parcels containing their purchases, some making their way home from business, others standing in groups near the theatres. There were tram-cars and omnibuses and all sorts of vehicles jostling in the central part of the town. A little later I saw people streaming out from a popular matinee. There were old men selling the first issues of the evening papers, and crying some sensational news which was not of the slightest importance but which somehow seemed good fun. I was delighted with everything I saw. It was a positive joy not to see any green uniforms, nor any grey uniforms, nor any yellow uniforms. Green and grey and yellow are beautiful colours, but the plain black of the civilian dress of the men in the streets of Durven seemed pleasanter, and the costumes of the women seemed positively beautiful. There were children walking with their mothers, and little urchins racing about in the side streets. I could have laughed with joy at the sight of them: I had seen no children for five months, only little future-Meccanians. There were old women selling flowers. I wondered if they were poor; they looked fat and happy at any rate, and they were free to sell flowers or do anything else they liked. I turned into a cafe. A little band was playing some rollicking frivolous music that I recognised. I remembered some of my former friends making sarcastic remarks about this kind of music. It was not good music, yet it made me feel like laughing or dancing. There was such a babel of talk I could hardly hear the band. Not that I wanted to! I was quite content to hear the happy voices round me, to watch the simple comedies of human intercourse, and to feel that I was out of prison. I strolled out again. This time I looked at the streets themselves, at the buildings and houses and shops. I dived down a side street or two and found myself by the river among little wharves and docks, all on the tiniest scale. The streets were rather untidy and not too clean; the houses were irregularly built. I was in the old town apparently. As I walked farther I noticed that by far the greater part of the town had been built during the last fifty years or so, yet the place looked as if it were trying to preserve the appearance of age. At another time I should probably have thought the town rather dull and uninteresting, for there was nothing noteworthy about it. If there had once been any genuine mediaeval churches or guild halls or places of architectural interest they must have been destroyed, yet I discovered a strange joy and delight in everything I saw.
After dark, when I had dined at the little hotel where I was to sleep that night, I went off at once to the nearest theatre, which happened to be a music hall. I laughed at the turns until people looked at me to see if I were drunk or demented. When they saw I was only a little excited they made good-humoured remarks. They were rather pleased that I should be so easily amused. "Perhaps he has just come out of prison," said one; "no doubt it is rather dull there." "Perhaps he is a friend of one of the actors," said another, "and wants to encourage him." "Perhaps he has come from the land where jokes are prohibited," said a third. "Perhaps he is a deaf man who has recovered his hearing," said another. "Or a blind man who has recovered his sight." "Anyhow, he knows how to enjoy himself." Such were the remarks they made.
When I came out I strolled about the streets until after midnight. It seemed so jolly to be able to go just where one pleased.
In the morning I looked up the trains to Prisa and found that I could reach it in a few hours. So I decided to spend the morning in Durven and go on to Prisa in the afternoon. I strolled into the open market-place. How strange it seemed! People in all sorts of simple costumes were going round to the various stalls picking up one thing here and another there. The usual little comedies of bargaining were going on. There were all sorts of trifles for sale, including toys for children—real toys, not disguised mathematical problems, or exercises in mechanical ingenuity. There were dolls and rattles and hoops and balls and whistles and fishing-rods and marbles and pegtops and dolls' houses and furniture and bricks and a hundred things besides. Then there were gingerbread stalls, ice-cream stalls, cocoa-nut shies, swings and even a little merry-go-round. I felt I should like to ride on that merry-go-round, but as it was early in the forenoon there were only a few children—good heavens! what were children doing here? They ought to have been at school, or at any rate being instructed in the use of Stage II. B toys. I turned into the street where the best shops were. Even the grocers' shops looked interesting. There were goods from all over the world. There were cheeses packed in dainty little cases, and dates in little boxes covered with pictures; tea in packets and canisters representing absurd Chinamen and Hindoo coolies. The clothing shops were full of the latest fashions, although this was a small provincial town; and very dainty and charming they looked. Then there were antique shops and bric-a-brac shops, print shops and jewellers' shops. I could have spent days wandering about like a child at a fair. I had never realised before that the meanest European town—outside Meccania—is a sort of perennial bazaar.
I tore myself away, and after luncheon took train to Prisa. The confusion and bustle at the stations was delightful; the chatter of the passengers was most entertaining. There were people in shabby clothes and people in smart costumes. There were ticketcollectors and guards in rather dirty-looking uniforms, and an occasional gendarme who looked as if he had come off the comic-opera stage. The villages on the route were like the villages I had seen before in Europe—fragments of bygone ages mixed up with the latest devices in farm buildings and model cottages; churches built in the twelfth century and post offices built in the twentieth; mediaeval barns and modern factories. At length we reached Prisa, which needs no description from me.
It looked like an old friend, and I lost no time in resuming the habits I had adopted during my previous stay. I looked up some of my old acquaintances, and we spent days in endless talk about everything under the sun. What a delight it was to read the newspapers, no matter how silly they were! How delightful to hear the latest gossip about the latest political crisis, the latest dramatic success, the latest social scandal, the latest literary quarrel! In a week or two I had almost forgotten the existence of Meccania. I had seen nothing to remind me of it. I began to understand why the people in Francaria and Luniland were so ignorant of that country. Why should they bother their heads about it? It seemed to me now like a bad dream, a nightmare. Th
ey were quite right to ignore it, to forget it. And yet, suppose Meccania should startle Europe again? And with a chemical war this time! Would they be able to escape? Or would the Super-Insects finally conquer the human race? I confess I felt some doubt. It seemed not impossible that the nightmare I had escaped from was a doom impending over the whole world. And it is because I could not dismiss this doubt that I have written a faithful account of what I saw and heard in Meccania, the Super-State.
* * *
Contents
A HONEYMOON IN SPACE
By George Griffith
PROLOGUE
ABOUT eight o'clock on the morning of the 5th of November, 1900, those of the passengers and crew of the American liner St. Louis who happened, whether from causes of duty or of their own pleasure, to be on deck, had a very strange—in fact a quite unprecedented experience.
The big ship was ploughing her way through the long, smooth rollers at her average twenty-one knots towards the rising sun, when the officer in charge of the navigating bridge happened to turn his glasses straight ahead. He took them down from his eyes, rubbed the two object-glasses with the cuff of his coat, and looked again. The sun was shining through a haze which so far dimmed the solar disc that it was possible to look straight at it without inconvenience to the eyes.
The officer took another long squint, put his glasses down, rubbed his eyes and took another, and murmured, "Well I'm damned!"
Just then the Fourth Officer came up on to the bridge to relieve his senior while he went down far a cup of coffee and a biscuit. The Second took him away to the other end of the bridge, out of hearing of the helmsman and the quartermaster standing by, and said almost in a whisper:
"Say, Norton, there's something ahead there that I can't make out. Just as the sun got clear above the horizon I saw a black spot go straight across it, right through the upper and lower limbs. "I looked again, and it was plumb in the middle of the disc. "Look, he went on, speaking louder in his growing excitement, there it is again! I can see it without the glasses now. See?"
The Fourth did not reply at once. He had the glasses close to his eyes, and was moving them slowly about as though he were following some shifting object in the sky. Then he handed them back, and said:
"If I didn't believe the thing was impossible I should say that's an air-ship; but, for the present, I guess I'd rather wait till it gets a bit nearer, if it's coming. Still, there is something. Seems to be getting bigger pretty fast, too. Perhaps it would be as well to notify the old man. What do you think?"
"Guess we'd better," said the Second. "S'pose you go down. Don't say anything except to him. We don't want any more excitement among the people than we can help."
The Fourth nodded and went down the steps, and the Second began walking up and down the bridge, every now and then taking another squint ahead. Again and again the mysterious shape crossed the disc of the sun, always vertically as though, whatever it might be, it was steering a direct course from the sun to the ship, its apparent rising and falling being due really to the dipping of her bows into the swells.
"Well, Mr. Charteris, what's the trouble?" said the Skipper as he reached the bridge. "Nothing wrong, I hope? Have you sighted a derelict, or what? Ay, what in hell's that!"
His hands went up to his eyes and he stared for a few moments at the pale yellow oblate shape of the sun.
At this moment the St. Louis' head dipped again, and the Captain saw something like a black line swiftly drawn across the sun from bottom to top.
"That's what I wanted to call your attention to, sir," said the Second in a low tone. "I first noticed it crossing the sun as it rose through the mist. I thought it was a spot of dirt on my glasses, but it has crossed the sun several times since then, and for some minutes seemed to remain dead in the middle of it. Later on it got quite a lot larger, and whatever it is it's approaching us pretty rapidly. You see it's quite plain to the naked eye now."
By this time several of the crew and of the early loungers on deck had also caught sight of the strange thing which seemed to be hanging and swinging between the sky and the sea. People dived below for their glasses, knocked at their friends' state-room doors and told them to get up because something was flying towards the ship through the air; and in a very few minutes there were hundreds of passengers on deck in all varieties of early morning costume, and scores of glasses, held to anxious eyes, were being directed ahead.
The glasses, however, soon became unnecessary, for the passengers had scarcely got up on deck before the mysterious object to the eastward at length took definite shape, and as it did so mouths were opened as well as eyes, for the owners of the eyes and mouths beheld just then the strangest sight that travellers by sea or land had ever seen.
Within the distance of about a mile it swung round at right angles to the steamer's course with a rapidity which plainly showed that it was entirely obedient to the control of a guiding intelligence, and hundreds of eager eyes on board the liner saw, sweeping down from the grey-blue of the early morning sky, a vessel whose hull seemed to be constructed of some metal which shone with a pale, steely lustre.
It was pointed at both ends, the forward end being shaped something like a spur or ram. At the after end were two flickering, interlacing circles of a glittering greenish-yellow colour, apparently formed by two intersecting propellers driven at an enormous velocity. Behind these was a vertical fan of triangular shape. The craft appeared to be flat-bottomed, and for about a third of her length amidships the upper half of her hull was covered with a curving, dome-like roof of glass.
"She's an air-ship of some sort, there's no doubt about that," said the Captain, "so I guess the great problem has got solved at last. And yet it ain't a balloon, because it's coming against the wind, and it's nothing of the aeroplane sort neither, because it hasn't planes or kites or any fixings of that kind. Still it's made of something like metal and glass, and it must take a lot of keeping up. It's travelling at a pretty healthy speed too. Getting on for a hundred miles an hour, I should guess. Ah! he's going to speak us! Hope he's honest."
Everybody on board the St. Louis was up on deck by this time, and the excitement rose to fever-heat as the strange vessel swept down towards them from the middle sky, passed them like a flash of light, swung round the stern, and ranged up alongside to starboard some twenty feet from the bridge rail.
She was about a hundred and twenty feet long, with some twenty feet of depth and thirty of beam, and the Captain and many of his officers and passengers were very much relieved to find that, as far as could be seen, she carried no weapons of offence.
As she ranged up alongside, a sliding door opened in the glass-domed roof amidships, just opposite to the end of the St. Louis' bridge. A tall, fair-haired, clean-featured man, of about thirty, in grey flannels, tipped up his golf cap with his thumb, and said:
"Good morning, Captain! You remember me, I suppose? Had a fine passage, so far? I thought I should meet you somewhere about here."
The Captain of the St. Louis, in common with every one else on board, had already had his credulity stretched about as far as it would go, and he was beginning to wonder whether he was really awake; but when he heard the hail and recognised the speaker he stared at him in blank and, for the moment, speechless bewilderment. Then he got hold of his voice again and said, keeping as steady as he could:
"Good morning, my Lord! Guess I never expected to meet even you like this in the middle of the Atlantic! So the newspaper men were right for once in a way, and you have got an airship that will fly?"
"And a good deal more than that, Captain, if she wants to. I am just taking a trial trip across the Atlantic before I start on a run round the Solar System. Sounds like a lie, doesn't it? But it's coming off. Oh, good morning, Miss Rennick! Captain, may I come on board?"
"By all means, my Lord, only I'm afraid I daren't stop Uncle Sam's mails, even for you."
"There's no need for that, Captain, on a smooth sea like this," Was the reply. "Just
keep on as you are going and I'll come alongside."
He put his head inside the door and called something up a speaking-tube which led to a glass walled chamber in the forward part of the roof, where a motionless figure stood before a little steering wheel.
The craft immediately began to edge nearer and nearer to the liner's rail, keeping speed so exactly with her that the threshold of the door touched the end of the bridge without a perceptible jar. Then the flannel-clad figure jumped on to the bridge and held out his hand to the Captain.
As they shook hands he said in a low tone, "I want a word or two in private with you, as soon as possible."
